background preloader

Health

Facebook Twitter

Organic Consumers sur Twitter : "New studies show that #organic milk is more beneficial to your #health than non-organic! It's Official: Organic Milk Is Better For You | Prevention. If you've been on the fence as to whether or not organic milk is worth the extra cost, this should help you decide: Organic milk has more beneficial omega-3 fatty acids than the nonorganic milk, according to the findings of a new study published in PLoS One that looked at the nutritional makeup of nearly 400 organic and nonorganic milk samples collected over an 18-month period from across the United States. But that's not the entire story. Not only did the nonorganic milk contain lower levels of the good fat, but it also harbored higher levels of inflammation- and disease-promoting omega-6 fats; the healthy omega-6 to omega-3 ratio was not as favorable as in the organic milk.

While we do need some omega-6s in our diets, Americans tend to drastically overeat this type of fat. (It's the fat found in many junk foods and fried foods.) The good news for organic milk lovers? More from Rodale News: 10 Gross Facts about Your Beef The difference in quality isn't rocket science, either. Organic Consumers sur Twitter : "Scientists have been documenting the #health consequences of #Roundup for the past 20 years! Monsanto’s Roundup. Enough to Make You Sick. Monsanto invented the herbicide glyphosate and brought it to market under the trade name Roundup in 1974, after DDT was banned.

But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the use of Roundup surged, thanks to Monsanto's ingenious marketing strategy. The strategy? Genetically engineer seeds to grow food crops that could tolerate high doses of Roundup. With the introduction of these new GE seeds, farmers could now easily control weeds on their corn, soy, cotton, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa crops--crops that thrived while the weeds around them were wiped out by Roundup. Eager to sell more of its flagship herbicide, Monsanto also encouraged farmers to use Roundup as a dessicant, to dry out all of their crops so they could harvest them faster. Between 1996 - 2011, the widespread use of Roundup Ready GMO crops increased herbicide use in the U.S. by 527 million pounds—even though Monsanto claimed its GMO crops would reduce pesticide and herbicide use.

Bethelionqueen: blueokapi: Josh Sundquist-... Sweet poison: why sugar is ruining our health. But take heart. Around the world, a growing body of expert opinion – the 'No Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fightback and warning that our sweet habit is completely out of control, leaving a nasty taste in the mouth of the body public. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health, bar none, they say.

And unless we wise up and quit en masse, we don’t just risk personal obesity and disease, but national bankruptcy and collapse as the toll our ill health takes on our countries’ economies threatens to destabilise the modern world. The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times. Why is this? He adds: “Your palate adjusts significantly and quickly when you delete sugar. He’s right. KEST - 1450 AM San Francisco, CA. KEST - 1450 AM San Francisco, CA. Raw vegan fermented hemp sun dried tomato pesto. FARMAGEDDON.

GMO/GE

Health - Brian Fung - Soap: Does It Really Work? Many of us wash our hands with soap and water, but how much is the soap really worth? SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget/Flickr It's common knowledge that washing your hands often and well is the best way to prevent disease transmission. Many of us are accustomed to using soap during handwashing as a matter of course -- it's there in public bathrooms, it's in our homes, it's in the office kitchen. Then there are those miscreants among us who seem satisfied simply to rinse with running water before going back to their business. Who are these germ-mongerers, that they think they can ignore the very clearly labeled (and fragrant!) Before we get too carried away in our indignation, it's worth pointing out that soap is neither the holy elixir we sometimes think it is, nor do the vast majority of people actually use it as fastidiously as they should.

How effective is soap over plain old water? This has been proven in countries where access to soap is limited. Here's what they found: Health - Alexandra Jaffe - It's Settled: Dishwashers Beat the Lowly Hand, Almost Every Time. The secret is scalding water that's too hot for the human touch. Camilo Torres/Shutterstock There comes a time in every person's life when the futility of it all hits home, full force.

That time for me is every Friday, around mid-afternoon, when I set to tackling the piles of dishes that have accumulated in my sink throughout the week. I have a dozen plates and countless utensils to scrub and scrape. At the end of the day, how clean are they, really? According to science, my weekly crisis is well-founded: hand-washing doesn't get your dishes as clean as machine washing. "Any time you're dealing with food, or even just utensils touching a person's mouth, there's the potential for harmful bacteria and even parasites to transfer from food to food, or food to person," said Dr. Schneider described the formation of "biofilm" on plates left to steep in their own scum for prolonged periods of time.

What reliably sanitizes dishes is high heat, at temperatures greater than most people can stand. To Keep Yourself Healthy: Brush, Floss, and Measure Your Microbes Daily? | The Crux. Some Imported Shrimp on Grocery Store Shelves are Contaminated with Antibiotics | 80beats. Plague: Oregon Man Contracts Yersinia Pestis, Now Hospitalized In Critical Condition. An Oregon man is in critical condition after being infected with the plague, the Oregonian reports.

The man was bitten by a cat on Saturday, June 2, while trying to remove a dead mouse from the feline's mouth, according to the Crook County Department of Public Health and the Oregonian. The man checked himself into a hospital the following Friday. The Oregon Department of Public Health confirmed on Thursday that the unidentified man, who's in his 50s, has tested positive for Yersinia pestis, the same bacteria that was responsible for the pandemic that decimated Europe's population in the 14th century. The cat, which was a stray that had lived in the neighborhood for a number of years, has since died. Its body has been sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for testing. According to the CDC humans can become infected with plague after handling an infected animal or being bitten by a flea carrying the plague bacterium. To prevent the risk of transmission, Dr.

Western Medicine or WTF

Sunscreen vs. Cancer vs. Vitamin D ~ via Ryan Wanger. My entire life, I’ve been told over and over and over: exposure to the sun causes cancer. But what if it were the other way around? Exposure to sunlight actually prevents cancer?!? I’ll describe this in more detail shortly, but first, a quick summary: Plenty of studies have reported that Vitamin D prevents many types of cancerSunlight accounts for up to 75% of our daily Vitamin D intakeSkin cancer rates for Caucasians in the US have almost tripled in the last 30 years.

The rate for African Americans has actually decreased.On a state by state basis, the sunniest states do not have the highest rates of skin cancer Now clearly, I am not a doctor, so consider this information and do your own research. Vitamin D Seems to Prevent Cancer While no one is staking their reputation on this, over and over and over again, studies are showing decreased cancer rates (for MANY types of common cancers, not just skin) in people with higher Vitamin D intakes. Caucasian Skin Cancer Rates Are Skyrocketing. Portable UV-C bottle lights the way to clean water | Appliances and Kitchen Gadgets. This portable water bottle offers a bright solution for sterilizing water on the go. Portable beverage containers come in all shapes and sizes. Their proliferation has been for good reasons: they are efficient, economical, and easy to use.

Specialized containers exist for coffee, smoothies and water, with each variety having its own set of capabilities. Usually though, they don't come with a built-in light. Designed for the great outdoors, the CamelBak All Clear is UV-C portable water bottle that treats water from a variety from a variety of sources. The ultraviolet light interacts with microorganisms, destroying their DNA, which renders them harmless. To use, the 0.75-liter bottle is filled at a stream, faucet or spigot, and then capped.

Featuring a rechargeable (via USB) lithium ion battery pack, the water bottle holds a rather hefty charge. Arsenic being intentionally added to conventional chicken. (NaturalNews) The old saying, "You are what you eat," poses troubling implications for public health in light of a new study on chicken meat, which found that most of it contains dangerously high levels of toxic arsenic. And the worst part is that industrial chicken producers are directly responsible for causing this, as they intentionally add arsenic-based pharmaceutical drugs to chicken feed in order to bulk them up quickly and improve the color of their meat, which in turn poisons you and your family.

You can thank researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Maryland for exposing this little-known fact in a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. As it turns out, virtually all commercial chicken, including certified organic and "antibiotic-free" varieties, contain some level of inorganic arsenic. But it is the conventional chicken fed arsenic-based drugs that have the highest levels. Sources for this article include: Our broken medical system. Dr. Donald Berwick is the guy who ran Medicare and Medicaid for the past 17 months, and he quit last week.

In his parting remarks, he said that 20 to 30 percent of health care spending is waste, yielding no benefits to patients and further clogging up a system that is, by its very nature, sluggish and tortuous. He listed five reasons that accounted for the majority of the waste he had seen: 0vertreatment of patients, failure to coordinate care, the administrative complexity of the health care system, burdensome rules and fraud. It seems to me that three of these problems are really just subsets of a fourth, "the administrative complexity of the health care system. " "Failure to coordinate care" happens because there are too many forms to fill out and too little understanding of the complexity, even among doctors. But it is the first issue that concerns me: overtreatment of patients. So one thing to keep in mind: We are overtreated partially because we ask for it.

"Hello, Johns Hopkins? Food giants fight proposed nutrition guidelines. Washington -- An effort by four federal agencies to limit marketing of junk food to children has provoked a fight between the packaged food industry and public health groups as intense as the cigarette wars of the 1980s. The agency guidelines, ordered by Congress in 2009, are due this month after a 1 1/2-year delay. They will be scaled back after a ferocious lobbying campaign by food manufacturers who fear that Twinkies are fast becoming the next tobacco. The stakes are high, both for the $1 trillion food industry and for public health groups alarmed by Americans' growing girth. A third of poor preschoolers are now obese by age 5. "The idea of prevention is to stop that before it starts, and industry knows the same thing," said Michele Simon, an Oakland public health attorney and author of "Appetite for Profit.

" Voluntary guidelines The nutrition guidelines would be voluntary, aimed at reducing unhealthy ingredients and increasing healthier nutrients in foods marketed to children.

Natural Health

Jobs, revenue lost in pot dispensary crackdown. The federal Department of Justice's crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California has meant the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to cannabis advocates and government statistics. An estimated 2,500 people statewide have lost their jobs since late September, when California's four U.S. attorneys sent letters that threatened jail sentences for dispensary owners and the possible seizure of buildings that house the pot clubs, said Dan Rush, director of the United Food and Commercial Workers' national medical cannabis division.

The union began organizing medical marijuana workers in May 2010. Of those jobs, which union officials say include people who are directly employed by marijuana dispensaries as well as those with indirect ties to the industry, about 50 have been lost in San Francisco and dozens more around the Bay Area. Representatives for Mr. Wages and benefits "These are all good, single-earner, breadwinner jobs," Rush said. YouTube.