Doctor Warns Consumers of Popcorn Fumes
http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2007/09/05/755478.html
By MARCUS KABEL, Associated Press Writer
Wed Sep 5, 7:47 AM
Consumers, not just factory workers, may be in danger from fumes from buttery flavoring in microwave popcorn, according to a warning letter to federal regulators from a doctor at a leading lung research hospital.
A pulmonary specialist at Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center has written to federal agencies to say doctors there believe they have the first case of a consumer who developed lung disease from the fumes of microwaving popcorn several times a day for years.
“We cannot be sure that this patient’s exposure to butter flavored microwave popcorn from daily heavy preparation has caused his lung disease,” cautioned Dr. Cecile Rose. “However, we have no other plausible explanation.”
The July letter, made public Tuesday by a public health policy blog, refers to a potentially fatal disease commonly called popcorn lung that has been the subject of lawsuits by hundreds of workers at food factories exposed to chemicals used for flavoring.
In response to Rose’s finding, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association issued a statement Tuesday recommending that its members reduce “to the extent possible” the amount of diacetyl in butter flavorings they make. It noted that diacetyl is approved for use in flavors by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
One national popcorn manufacturer, Weaver Popcorn Co. of Indianapolis, said last week it would replace the butter flavoring ingredient because of consumer concern. Congress has also been debating new safety measures for workers in food processing plants exposed to diacetyl.
The FDA said in an e-mail it is evaluating Rose’s letter and “carefully considering the safety and regulatory issues it raises.”
Fred Blosser, spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said it is the first case the institute has seen of lung disease apparently linked to popcorn fumes outside the workplace.
The occupational safety arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is working on a response to the letter.
William Allstetter, spokesman for National Jewish Medical, confirmed the letter was sent by Rose, a specialist in occupational and environmental lung diseases and director of the hospital’s Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic.
“There have been no other cases that we know of other than the industrial occupational ones,” Allstetter said.
Rose acknowledged in the letter that it is difficult to confirm through one case that popping buttered microwave popcorn at home can cause lung disease.
However, she said she wanted to alert regulators of the potential public health implications.
Rose said the ailing patient, a man whom she wouldn’t identify, consumed “several bags of extra butter flavored microwave popcorn” every day for several years.
He described progressively worsening respiratory symptoms of coughing and shortness of breath. Tests found his ability to exhale was deteriorating, Rose said, although his condition seemed to stabilize after he quit using microwave popcorn.
She said her staff measured airborne levels of diacetyl in the patient’s home when he cooked the popcorn. The levels were “similar to those reported in the microwave oven exhaust area” at the quality assurance unit of the popcorn plant where the affected employees worked, she said.
David Michaels, of the George Washington University School of Public Health, who first published Rose’s letter on his blog, The Pump Handle, said the finding is another reason for federal regulators to crack down on diacetyl exposure by workers and consumers.
“This letter is a red flag, suggesting that exposure to food flavor chemicals is not just killing workers, but may also be causing disease in people exposed to food flavor chemicals in their kitchens,” Michaels wrote on his public health policy blog.
Eating blueberries slashes colon cancer risk by 57 percent, animal study finds
http://www.newstarget.com/021951.html
A compound found in blueberries shows promise of preventing colon cancer, according to a new study. Scientists at Rutgers University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a joint study on animals, and found that the compound — called pterostilbene — lessened pre-cancerous lesions and inhibited genes involved in inflammation. Researchers presented the study at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in March.
“This study underscores the need to include more berries in the diet, especially blueberries,” said study leader Bandaru Reddy, Ph.D., a professor in the chemical biology department at Rutgers. Although the blueberry compound won’t cure colon cancer, it represents a strategy for preventing the disease naturally, said Reddy, who specializes in studying the relationship between nutrition and colon cancer.
The researchers studied 18 rats in which colon cancer had been induced in a manner similar to human colon cancer development. All of the animals were placed on a balanced diet, with half of the animals’ diets supplemented with pterostilbene. After eight weeks, the rats fed pterostilbene had 57 percent fewer pre-cancerous colon lesions compared to the control group. The researchers also noted that pterostilbene inhibited certain genes involved in inflammation, considered a colon cancer risk factor.
Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. It has been linked to a high intake of saturated fats and calories common in Western diets. Pterostilbene may be able to reverse this process, possibly by lowering lipids, Reddy said.
Reddy cited a recent study by co-author Agnes Rimando of the Department of Agriculture. Rimando demonstrated that blueberries, particularly their skins, can lower cholesterol when fed to animals.
Some thirty different species of blueberries are native to North America. The berries are rich in anthocyanins, widely recognized for their antioxidant qualities. Blueberries are also a good source of ellagic acid, which blocks metabolic pathways that can lead to cancer.
Enzymes
If you’re looking for enzymes, here is a good place to buy:
After reading Enzyme Nutrition by Dr. Edward Howell, I wanted to get some and expected them to be costly. They are very reasonable.
Check out this new community…
The Nourishing Our Families Mission Statement:
Nourishing Our Families started as a way to provide consolidated and accurate information and support for people involved in the Traditional Foods community. We are dissatisfied with the misinformation or lack of information given to young families, and particularly breastfeeding mothers, by both other non-profit organizations and the culture at large.
Our purpose is to provide accurate information for making informed decisions in all areas of lifestyle, home and health. Accurate information and informed choice is critical in decision making in order to nourish the body, mind and spirit so that your family will reach its full potential. We wish to combine the facts and theories of solid nutrition and lifestyle with encouragement and support for helping you to feed and nourish your family in the best way possible.
Our goal is to give you the tools, resources and support you need for all facets of the Traditional Foods and Natural Family Living Lifestyle. We believe that Natural Family Living is an inherent extension of a traditional diet. It is critical to the health and sustainability of our families, and the betterment of our society.
FDA approves pill that stops periods; is womanhood a disease?
Conventional medicine has, for decades, preyed upon the “symptoms of womanhood” and attempted to transform every female activity from childbirth to menstruation into a disease requiring chemical treatment. Today, the FDA approved Lybrel, a daily pill for women that stops periods… forever.
The concept behind such a pill is based on the false idea that menstruation is a disease requiring a medical fix. Most sane people would agree that menstruation is, in fact, a natural biological function and not a disease. So why take a pill to stop it?
If you ask the women taking this pill, it’s because their periods are extremely painful or inconvenient. Taking Lybrel to stop the period is a typical Western-mindset approach to all ailments: Mask the symptoms and ignore the cause. Painful periods have a cause, mostly related to hormone imbalances caused by poor nutritional habits, lack of exercise and exposure to toxic chemicals in foods, medicines and personal care products (which contain hundreds of hormone-disrupting chemicals). Rather than addressing these underlying causes of poor health, many consumers wish to simply mask the symptoms and make them disappear at any cost, including ingesting potentially toxic prescription drugs whose long-term safety record is entirely unknown.
This desire to eliminate the symptoms of disease rather than addressing the underlying cause of poor health is a uniquely Western approach to health treatment. Americans mask joint pain with deadly COX-2 inhibitor drugs, they mask nutritional deficiencies with antidepressant drugs, and they mask poor cardiovascular health with statin drugs and blood thinners (which are made from rat poison chemicals, by the way, and that’s not an exaggeration). It’s like taking your car to a mechanic and instead of the guy fixing your engine, he just takes a can of spray paint and sprays over the engine warning lights on your dashboard. Problem solved! No more engine warning lights!
Women who take Lybrel to stop their periods are, in my opinion, doing the same thing with their health. And they’re potentially taking a huge risk since no one knows the long-term consequences of such blatant disruption of normal hormone cycles. You can bet, however, that the results won’t be positive. Although this is just a guess, I believe that long-term use of such synthetic chemicals may greatly increase the risk of hormone-related cancers such as breast cancer and cervical cancer. They may also cause blood stasis in the abdomen and could very easily, in my view, result in increased endometriosis and severe reproductive problems.
Both the manufacturer of this drug and the FDA, of course, say this chemical is perfectly safe. Then again, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are right now killing 100,000 Americans each year, even when used as directed. Just one drug, Vioxx, reportedly killed well over 50,000 Americans according to the FDA’s own senior drug safety whistleblower, and yet the FDA voted to put that drug right back on the market!
This is a critical point to understand here: The FDA believes that a drug that kills 50,000 people is not dangerous enough to pull off the market. Once you understand that point, some questions come to mind about Lybrel. How many women might die from the side effects of this drug? No one knows. It could be zero or a hundred thousand. If no more than 50,000 women are ultimately killed by it, the FDA likely claim that’s still within a safety margin and that “the drug benefits outweigh its risks!”
What, exactly, is the level of fatalities required for the FDA to consider a drug “too dangerous?” Because apparently a drug that kills 50,000 people is not dangerous enough for the FDA to restrict its use. In fact, the FDA has never announced what level of fatalities it considers high enough to trigger a drug recall. It may be that a drug killing 100,000 people would also be considered “safe” by the FDA. Or perhaps even 250,000 people. Technically, there is no level of death that cannot be declared “acceptably safe” by the FDA. (An herb, on the other hand, is pronounced as “dangerous at any dose” if it causes even a single fatality. This extreme double standard is standard operating procedure at the FDA, where all herbs are considered dangerous until proven safe, and all drugs are considered safe until proven dangerous.)
The hysteria of modern medicine
In my opinion, any woman taking Lybrel is embarking on a foolish experiment with her own health. It is not merely a dangerous course of action to pursue, it is the ultimate surrender of personal responsibility for one’s own health. It also admits to a male-dominated medical system that womanhood is, indeed, some sort of terrible disease that requires treatment.
Note that the words hysteria and hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus) have the same word roots. That’s because a hysterectomy was a procedure originally developed by men and used as a surgical weapon to make women “less hysterical.” It was long believed that the uterus was an organ that caused insanity! In reality, the organ that no doubt causes the most insanity is the penis, but that’s another story… notice that you don’t see male doctors recommending penisectomies as a cure for male insanity. Although, indeed, we would all be much safer if the arrogant men pushing these nonsense pharmaceuticals weren’t so cocky to begin with. Only women are advised to have their organs removed for emotional reasons. You ever notice that when it comes to cancer treatments for such organs, there’s a cry to “Save the testicle!” but “Remove the breast!” ?
(The word menstruate, by the way, has its roots in Latin, where the word mensis means “month.” It has no relational meaning to the modern English word “men.”)
Men have always dominated Western medicine, and they have always used chemicals and surgeries to control or dominate women. Even today, the male-dominated breast cancer industry is a for-profit system that preys upon women through harmful mammograms that actually cause cancer and produce shockingly high rates of false positives. As I’ve stated in previous articles here on NewsTarget, mammography harms 10 women for every 1 that it helps. Conventional breast cancer treatment is largely a medical hoax where men use fear to control women by corralling them into treatments where they can poison them with chemotherapy or slice off their breasts. (Sound insane? It is.)
My advice to women is to learn from your painful periods rather than trying to dissociate yourself from them. A painful period is a messenger that’s trying to tell you something. Perhaps you need to take a new look at your diet, your lifestyle and your use of toxic cosmetics and skin care products that disrupt normal hormone cycles. Painful periods can be transformed into painless periods through natural medicine. Chinese medicine is especially good at supporting this transformation. Diet plays a huge role, too.
Take responsibility for your health rather than abandoning it
Solving the health problem rather than simply masking it is the responsible thing to do with your body. It’s not an overnight solution like the seductively easy Lybrel pill, but it is a far wiser and more wholesome solution that honors your body rather than hijacking its natural functions. Chemical are not the answer to your health problems. They are merely seductive, harmful synthetic substances that will inevitably produce harmful side effects.
If you think your periods are painful today, just imagine the emotional pain of being diagnosed with breast cancer, undergoing chemotherapy that nearly kills you and having a mastectomy. Once you start down the path of chemical suppression of symptoms of pain, you begin a journey into the world of harmful medicine that will only leave you diseased and bankrupt, addicted to a dozen pharmaceuticals and suffering from liver failure, kidney disease, brain fog and chronic pain. Think carefully about what you’re doing to your body. It’s the only one you’ve got, and nature intends for a woman to have periods. Menstruation is not a disease. And womanhood is not a medical condition. Don’t fall for the male-dominated quackery that passes for medicine today, and don’t play pharmaceutical roulette with your body by taking Lybrel.
Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health
Expert links additive to cell damage
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 27 May 2007
A new health scare erupted over soft drinks last night amid evidence they may cause serious cell damage. Research from a British university suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA.
The problem - more usually associated with ageing and alcohol abuse - can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s.
The findings could have serious consequences for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who consume fizzy drinks. They will also intensify the controversy about food additives, which have been linked to hyperactivity in children.
Concerns centre on the safety of E211, known as sodium benzoate, a preservative used for decades by the £74bn global carbonated drinks industry. Sodium benzoate derives from benzoic acid. It occurs naturally in berries, but is used in large quantities to prevent mould in soft drinks such as Sprite, Oasis and Dr Pepper. It is also added to pickles and sauces.
Sodium benzoate has already been the subject of concern about cancer because when mixed with the additive vitamin C in soft drinks, it causes benzene, a carcinogenic substance. A Food Standards Agency survey of benzene in drinks last year found high levels in four brands which were removed from sale.
Now, an expert in ageing at Sheffield University, who has been working on sodium benzoate since publishing a research paper in 1999, has decided to speak out about another danger. Professor Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology, tested the impact of sodium benzoate on living yeast cells in his laboratory. What he found alarmed him: the benzoate was damaging an important area of DNA in the “power station” of cells known as the mitochondria.
He told The Independent on Sunday: “These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether.
“The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it - as happens in a number if diseased states - then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA - Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing.”
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) backs the use of sodium benzoate in the UK and it has been approved by the European Union but last night, MPs called for it to investigate urgently.
Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat chair of Parliament’s all-party environment group said: “Many additives are relatively new and their long-term impact cannot be certain. This preservative clearly needs to be investigated further by the FSA.”
A review of sodium benzoate by the World Health Organisation in 2000 concluded that it was safe, but it noted that the available science supporting its safety was “limited”.
Professor Piper, whose work has been funded by a government research council, said tests conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration were out of date.
“The food industry will say these compounds have been tested and they are complete safe,” he said. “By the criteria of modern safety testing, the safety tests were inadequate. Like all things, safety testing moves forward and you can conduct a much more rigorous safety test than you could 50 years ago.”
He advised parents to think carefully about buying drinks with preservatives until the quantities in products were proved safe by new tests. “My concern is for children who are drinking large amounts,” he said.
Coca-Cola and Britvic’s Pepsi Max and Diet Pepsi all contain sodium benzoate. Their makers and the British Soft Drinks Association said they entrusted the safety of additives to the Government.
http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2586652.ece
Meat-eating was essential for human evolution
Meat-eating was essential for human evolution,
says UC Berkeley anthropologist specializing in diet
By Patricia McBroom, Public Affairs
BERKELEY– Human ancestors who roamed the dry and open savannas of Africa about 2 million years ago routinely began to include meat in their diets to compensate for a serious decline in the quality of plant foods, according to a physical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was this new meat diet, full of densely-packed nutrients, that provided the catalyst for human evolution, particularly the growth of the brain, said Katharine Milton, an authority on primate diet.
Without meat, said Milton, it’s unlikely that proto humans could have secured enough energy and nutrition from the plants available in their African environment at that time to evolve into the active, sociable, intelligent creatures they became. Receding forests would have deprived them of the more nutritious leaves and fruits that forest-dwelling primates survive on, said Milton.
Her thesis complements the discovery last month by UC Berkeley professor Tim White and others that early human species were butchering and eating animal meat as long ago as 2.5 million years. Milton’s article integrates dietary strategy with the evolution of human physiology to argue that meat eating was routine. It is published this month in the journal “Evolutionary Anthropology” (Vol.8, #1).
Milton said that her theories do not reflect on today’s vegetarian diets, which can be completely adequate, given modern knowledge of nutrition.
“We know a lot about nutrition now and can design a very satisfactory vegetarian diet,” said Milton, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management.
But she added that the adequacy of a vegetarian diet depends either on modern scientific knowledge or on traditional food habits, developed over many generations, in which people have worked out a complete diet by putting different foods together.
In many parts of the world where people have little access to meat, they have run the risk of malnutrition, said Milton. This happened, for instance, in Southeast Asia where people relied heavily on a single plant food, polished rice, and developed the nutritional disease, beriberi. Closer to home, in the Southern United States, many people dependent largely on corn meal developed the nutritional disease, pellagra.
Milton argues that meat supplied early humans not only with all the essential amino acids, but also with many vitamins, minerals and other nutrients they required, allowing them to exploit marginal, low quality plant foods, like roots - foods that have few nutrients but lots of calories. These calories, or energy, fueled the expansion of the human brain and, in addition, permitted human ancestors to increase in body size while remaining active and social.
“Once animal matter entered the human diet as a dependable staple, the overall nutrient content of plant foods could drop drastically, if need be, so long as the plants supplied plenty of calories for energy,” said Milton.
The brain is a relentless consumer of calories, said Milton. It needs glucose 24 hours a day. Animal protein probably did not provide many of those calories, which were more likely to come from carbohydrates, she said.
Buffered against nutritional deficiency by meat, human ancestors also could intensify their use of plant foods with toxic compounds such as cyanogenic glycosides, foods other primates would have avoided, said Milton. These compounds can produce deadly cyanide in the body, but are neutralized by methionine and cystine, sulfur-containing amino acids present in meat. Sufficient methionine is difficult
to find in plants. Most domesticated grains - wheat, rice, maize, barley, rye and millet - contain this cyanogenic compound as do many beans and widely-eaten root crops such as taro and manioc.
Since plant foods available in the dry and deforested early human environment had become less nutritious, meat was critical for weaned infants, said Milton. She explained that small infants could not have processed enough bulky plant material to get both nutrients for growth and energy for brain development.
“I disagree with those who say meat may have been only a marginal food for early humans,” said Milton. “I have come to believe that the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution.”
Milton’s paper also demonstrates that the human digestive system is fundamentally that of a plant-eating primate, except that humans have developed a more elongated small intestine rather than retaining the huge colon of apes - a change in the human lineage which indicates a diet of more concentrated nutrients.
——————————————————————————-
This server has been established by the University of California at Berkeley Public Information Office. Copyright for all items on this server held by The Regents of the University of California. Thanks for your interest in UC Berkeley.
HIDDEN SOURCES OF MSG
HIDDEN SOURCES OF MSG
June 1, 1995
Food label descriptors that contain enough MSG to serve as common
MSG-reaction triggers
These ALWAYS contain MSG:
Glutamate Textured protein
Monosodium glutamate Hydrolyzed protein
Monopotassium glutamate (any protein that is hydrolyzed)
Glutamic acid Yeast extract
Calcium caseinate Yeast food
Sodium caseinate Autolyzed yeast
Gelatin Yeast nutrient
These very OFTEN contain MSG:
Malt extract Flavors(s) & Flavoring(s)
Malt flavoring Natural flavor(s) & flavoring(s)
Barley malt Natural pork flavoring
Bouillon Natural beef flavoring
Stock Natural chicken flavoring
Broth Seasonings (the word “seasonings”)
Carrageenan Soy sauce
Maltodextrin Soy sauce extract
Whey protein Soy protein
Whey protein isolate Soy protein isolate
Whey protein concentrate Soy protein concentrate
Pectin anything Protein fortified
anything Enzyme modified
These can be used to CREATE MSG:
Protease enzymes Protease Fungal protease Enzymes
Hidden MSG is not limited to use in food. MSG sensitive people have
reported reactions to soaps, shampoos, hair conditioners, and
cosmetics that contain hidden MSG. The most obvious common hiding places
are in ingredients called “hydrolyzed protein” and “amino acids.”
http://www.holisticmed.com/msg/msg-sources.txt
Drinks, candy, and chewing gum are also potential sources of hidden MSG.
Also, aspartic acid, found in aspartame (NutraSweet) ordinarily causes MSG
type reactions in MSG sensitive people. Aspartame is
found in some medications. Check with your pharmacist.
Binders and fillers for medications, nutrients, and supplements, both
prescription and non-prescription, including enteral feeding
materials and some fluids administered intravenously in hospitals, may
contain MSG.
Reactions to MSG are dose related, i.e., some people react to even very
small amounts of MSG while others usually only react to relatively
more. MSG-induced reactions may occur immediately after
contact or after as much as 48 hours.
There are additional ingredients that appear to cause MSG reactions in
ACUTELY sensitive people. A list is available for those interested.
Truth in Labeling Campaign (TLC) PO Box 2532 Darien, IL 60561
Make your own butter!
I had no idea making butter was this easy!
I set out raw cream for 8 hours, then food processed 2 cups of it on high speed. After a couple of minutes I could hear the noise changing tone, and after about 5 minutes, I stopped it. I put my spoon in, and dredged up pure, yellow, butter!! It was so exciting. I scooped it all into a bowl and patted out the milk. I did another 2 cups and got more! I got probably 1/2 coup of butter.
I have more cream out today and will process it tonight. I want to see how much butter I can get out of a gallon of milk.
Here are some pics:
Make your own flour!
Making your own flour is easy, and enjoyable. Best of all, fresh flour is packed with nutritional value.
I like to soak, sprout, then dehydrate mine. Soaking breaks down phylic acid, sprouting maximizes nutritional content, and dehydrating makes them dry so them can be ground into flour.
Here’s what I do:
Soak: Place 1 cup wheat berries in a quart-sized mason jar. Fill to the top with water and cover. Let soak overnight.
Sprout: In the morning, drain water, and lay jar on its side. Rinse 2-3 times a day (or more if you want). Within 2-3 days you should see sprouts 1/4″ long. You can sprinkle these right on a salad!
Dehydrate: For dehydrating, pour seeds into the liner of your food dehydrator, and place on the lowest setting overnight (or 8-10 hours). Now they are ready to be ground!
Grinding: Place desired amount of wheat berries in blender and blend on the highest setting for at least 3 minutes. If you have a grain mill, use it! It will produce finer flour.
Enjoy!
As pizza!
