(http://www.nejm.org)Nuts are already known to be a healthy, nutrient-dense food, and even the Food and Drug Administration suggests that daily nut consumption as part of a low-fat diet "may reduce the risk of heart disease." However, few studies have investigated nut consumption in relation to total mortality, and many that have are quite limited. That is why researchers from Boston and Indianapolis teamed up to evaluate the health benefits of eating nuts.
The researchers followed 76,464 women and 42,498 men who were respectively in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Throughout the study and follow-up, researchers evaluated the individuals' nut consumption through 2-year interval surveys and kept track of participant mortality and causes of death.
At the end of the study, the researchers found that "those who consumed nuts more frequently were leaner, less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, and more likely to use multivitamin supplements; they also consumed more fruits and vegetables and drank more alcohol." They also discovered that nut consumption was inversely associated with deaths due to cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease, in addition to being associated with reduced weight gain.
Based on a serving size of 28 g, or 1 oz, the researchers found relationships between nut consumption and mortality as follows:
Seven servings or more per week: 20% lower death rate.
Five or six per week: 15% lower death rate.
Two to four per week: 13% lower death rate.
One per week: 11% lower death rate.
Less than one per week: 7% lower death rate.
The mortality rates are based off of hazard ratios for death which all had a 95% confidence interval and are in comparison to those who reported eating no nuts.
The researchers wrote in their study, "In conclusion, our analysis of samples from these two prospective cohort studies showed significant inverse associations of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality." However, they warn that cause and effect relationships cannot yet be established and call for controlled, randomized clinical trials for further investigation.
Ralph Fucetola, JD, a.k.a. the Vitamin Lawyer, attended a meeting on November 13, 2013, with former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party along with healthcare providers and concerned citizens to discuss the issues of health freedom and Obamacare.
The meeting, which was recorded on video, begins with Fucetola asking Johnson about his views on health freedom and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Johnson's response:
"Well, I really believe in free markets. I think that the FDA really restricts our choices. And what are attorneys for? Wouldn't attorneys do a much better job of assigning and bringing about justice to drug companies that were actually egregious in what they sold to the public as safe? I think the FDA really has acted as a good housekeeping seal of approval that has limited liability as opposed to actually assigning liability due. So, we could do without an FDA. There's actually a way to not have an FDA, and we would be a healthier country as a result; we'd have more choices."
Fucetola then states, "You know, the Natural Solutions Foundation has an interim measure that supports the idea of divesting the FDA of its food authority, because we feel that having food and drugs in the same federal bureaucracy is a recipe for disaster."
Johnson: "Nobody wants to say that we don't want to have safe food, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the government is accomplishing that. And that's what I want to say, is that, as well intentioned as the government is, are they really making food any healthier? [W]ith the FDA, do we not still have incidents where people die, because the food is contaminated? This is something that will go on for perpetuity, and companies that sell this food are liable and are held liable regardless of government interference."
Fucetola then brings up the issue of food and GMO labeling, which is something that Johnson, who suffers from celiac disease, fully supports. He says that honest labeling should be required for food companies and that the government should not ban substances like trans-fats. Rather, they should be labeled so that informed consumers can make choices for themselves, then harmful substances would be phased out through natural free market laws; i.e., nobody would sell what nobody would want to buy.
The video then cuts to a meeting with several individuals at New York City's Players Club. The rest of the discussion covers many topics, including the FDA safeguarding pharmaceutical companies rather than assigning due liability, vaccine schedules, health freedom, how Healthcare.gov is just the tip of the Obamacare iceberg that threatens to sink the United States, and divesting food authority from the FDA.
In response to concerns about how supplements and such would be regulated without the FDA, one meeting attendee notes, "We do not have an electronic safety administration, but every single [computer tablet], you buy it in a box, there will be two marks: UL and CE." CE is the European Union's government safety organization; in the United States, UL, Underwriters Laboratories, is a private industry coalition dedicated to public safety. The fact that we are able to rely on the private sector to ensure the safety of electronic devices proves that the FDA is wholly unnecessary.
Fucetola highlights the ineffectiveness of the FDA: "Half of the drugs that the FDA approves are, within five years of approval... withdrawn from the marketplace due to serious side effects."
"What it really means is that the general population is the final experimental subject, if you will."
Watch the video for yourself to hear the full discussion between this group of libertarian thinkers and the viable, long-term solutions they propose to contemporary issues that the two-party system continues to ignore at the peril of America's future.
(http://www.nytimes.com)Last week, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACA) released new guidelines for lowering cholesterol in addition to an online calculator for determining patients' disease risks and treatment options. Though it seems well intended, the risk calculator drastically overestimates risks to the point that it could mislead millions more of otherwise healthy individuals to start taking statin drugs.
The AHA and ACA admit that the risk calculator is not perfect but say that it is a step forward for public health and that the guidelines say patients and doctors should discuss treatment options instead of just doing what the calculator suggests.
According to the New York Times:
Dr. Sidney Smith, the executive chairman of the guideline committee, said the associations would examine the flaws found in the calculator and determine if changes were needed. "We need to see if the concerns raised are substantive," he said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "Do there need to be changes?"
The problem was identified by Dr. Paul M. Ridker and Dr. Nancy Cook, two Harvard Medical School professors who first pointed out the issue when they were sent drafts of the guidelines last year. The professors' recommendations to change the calculator either didn't make it to the development team or were ignored, as the calculator continues to use old, outdated data from the 1990s.
Drs. Ridker and Cook tested the calculator and found that, depending on the population, it overpredicted risk by 75 to 150 percent. For example, a man with a 4 percent risk might be wrongly informed that he has an 8 percent risk. The guidelines advise treatment for those with more than a 7.5 percent risk, so based on these guidelines and this calculator, people might unnecessarily be given harmful statin drugs.
The calculator was also tested by other doctors who felt like it was untrustworthy. "Something is terribly wrong," Dr. Steven Nissen, chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said. "[Using the calculator's results,] your average healthy Joe gets treated, virtually every African-American man over 65 gets treated."
The risk calculator presents a very serious risk of increased overprescription of dangerous pharmaceuticals in vulnerable populations. Statin drugs have already been linked to memory loss, muscle pain, increased diabetes risk and artery calcification. This debacle could cause more people to experience those debilitating side effects while filling Big Pharma's pockets; however, it seems more likely to cause the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology to lose credibility.
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk)A new study has found that women who take oral contraceptives for longer than three years increase their risk of glaucoma by more than two times.
Glaucoma is an eye condition in which drainage tubes become blocked, leading to increased fluid pressure which can damage optic nerves and nerve fibers from the retina; it can eventually lead to blindness.
Scientists are urging gynecologists and ophthalmologists to warn their patients of the risk and to screen for the condition.
According to the Daily Mail,
The researchers used data from 2005 to 2008 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
This included 3,406 female participants aged 40 years or older from across the U.S. who completed the survey's vision and reproductive health questionnaire and underwent eye examinations.
It found women who had used oral contraceptives, no matter which kind, for longer than three years were 2.05 times more likely to also report that they had been diagnosed with glaucoma.
The scientists were unable to establish a causative relationship.
"This study should be an impetus for future research to prove the cause and effect of oral contraceptives and glaucoma," lead researcher Dr. Shan Lin said. "At this point, women who have taken oral contraceptives for three or more years should be screened for glaucoma and followed closely by an ophthalmologist, especially if they have any other existing risk factors."
(http://www.nytimes.com)According to the New York Times, Japan will no longer be able to meet its earlier goal in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, citing nuclear plant shutdowns following the Fukushima disaster. Japan is one of the world's leading polluters (along with China, the U.S., Russia and India), but they previously had a plan to cut emission rates to 25 percent from the levels in 1990. That plan relied on nuclear energy for clean electricity, but now, with Japan's nuclear power program shut down over safety concerns, it is projected to release 3 percent more greenhouse gases by 2020.
As reported by the New York Times,
"We're down to zero nuclear; anyone doing the math will find that target impossible now," Nobuteru Ishihara, the environment minister, said in Tokyo after announcing the new target. He said the original goal was "unrealistic in the first place."
"The current government seeks economic growth while doing our best to meet emissions targets," he added.
This announcement comes as international negotiations regarding pollution and the environment take place in Warsaw, Germany. The Warsaw conference intends to make progress in developing a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expired last year.
"Energy demand is going to increase," Stuart Neil, senior director of external relations and communications for the World Energy Council, said. "We need to look at that in a sustainable way. But the reality is that we're looking at a doubling of demand by 2050," with the majority of growth expected from developing countries.
He added, "Even in the best-case scenario, there will be a doubling of CO2 emissions by 2050."
(http://gmwatch.org)South Australia (SA) will continue its ban on genetically modified (GM) crops until at least 2019. SA is the only mainland Australian state to maintain a ban on GM crop production and trials.
SA Government Minister Leon Bignell said that the state's moratorium on GM crops gives producers an advantage in foreign markets, helps protect premium food and wine production and will allow grain producers to attract higher prices.
"We've got a strong reputation not just around Australia but around the world for producing clean, green premium food and we think having a moratorium on the growing of GM crops really helps us in that end," he said.
The Opposition said that they would also support the continuing ban on GM crop production, but that "it needs to be monitored."
A new video by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas has revealed rampant fraud already taking advantage of taxpayers through Obamacare. In the video, a private investigator pretending to need help enrolling in the system meets with Obamacare navigators in Texas.
As if the roll-out of Obamacare hasn't been disastrous enough, investigators have now caught people placed in positions of public trust, and being paid with government grants (i.e. your taxes), telling enrollees to lie on their Obamacare forms to get lower premiums.
As one Obamacare navigator assistant tells an investigator at the National Urban League Irving Community Center, "I always lie on mine."
The Obamacare navigators also tell him not to report that he smokes to avoid increased premiums and also to evade taxes by not reporting cash income on the side. "Yeah it didn't happen," one navigator says.
"Never report it," says the other.
The video then goes to Enroll America, which Daniel Clayton tells an undercover journalist is a "501(c)(3), so it's purely a nonprofit. It's not partisan, non-political." Contradicting this, Enroll America is later called "the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Convention]."
However, Enroll America works and appears to share data with Battleground Texas, a political action committee. Except for in certain conditions, it is illegal for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to share mailing lists and certain information to political action committees. Both organizations work to sign people up on healthcare exchanges. Battleground Texas is a "Democratic organization" that was "started by President Obama's National Field Director," is funded by out-of-state "national money" and is "dedicated to turning Texas blue."
Watch the video for yourself to see how fraud is being promoted by Obamacare navigators and how Obama's socialist lackeys are conspiring to manipulate Texas politics.
(http://www.latimes.com)A team of researchers from the University of Montreal's Department of Kinesiology have recently linked exercise during pregnancy to improved fetal brain development.
The scientists conducting the study gathered women in the first trimester of their pregnancy and split them into two groups. The first group, the active group, was advised to engage in moderate exercise for a minimum of 60 minutes per week, while the other group, the sedentary group, was basically told to relax. The active group ended up getting an average of 117 minutes of exercise per week, and the sedentary group exercised for an average of 12 minutes per week.
The researchers tested each of the newborns' brains 8 to 12 days after birth. They waited until the babies fell asleep and then played sounds and measured the resulting brain activity. The scientists found that the babies in the active group had more well developed brains and yielded stronger responses.
The researchers wrote in the conclusion of their study's abstract:
"Exercise during pregnancy had an impact on the newborn's brain.... [T]he positive wave with a smaller area amplitude in the active group suggests heightened maturity. To better understand the functional significance of our findings, children from this study will undergo developmental testing at age 1."
Exercise is already known to improve a person's health, both physically and mentally. And it is obvious that fetuses depend on their mothers for their nutrition and development; now, this new study gives expecting mothers another definitive reason to get up and get active.
(http://www.eurekalert.org)Two recently published studies show the negative effects that soft drink and sugar consumption can have on kidney health
The first study, led by Ryohei Yamamoto, MD, PhD, from Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, found that consuming two or more soft drinks per day caused the development of proteinuria, or increased protein in the urine, a common symptom of kidney dysfunction. This study followed nearly 8,000 university employees and found that, after a median of 2.9 years, 8.4% of those who drank zero soft drinks per day, 8.9% who drank one daily and 10.7% who drank two or more sodas per day developed proteinuria.
The second study was led by Agustin Gonzalex-Vicente from Case Western University used rats to examine that effects of sugar on kidney function. The researchers found that moderate fructose intake increases the kidney's sensitivity to angiotensin II, a protein that regulates salt balance. This caused an increase in salt reabsorption by kidney cells, which could explain why high-fructose corn syrup consumption can contribute to diabetes, kidney failure and high blood pressure.
(http://abcnews.go.com)Merck's Gardasil vaccine has claimed two new victims. Two young Wisconsin sisters, Madelyne and Olivia Meylor, who are respectively 20 and 19 years old, have recently experienced ovarian failure, where their ovaries have stopped producing eggs. The two sisters claim that the HPV vaccine Gardasil is to blame. The Meylors have also developed premature menopause, causing them to suffer from insomnia, night sweats, head aches and infertility, most likely, for the rest of their lives.
According to ABC News, Mark Krueger, the attorney representing the sisters, said that this "is the first allegation of its kind to reach a hearing through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a special court established to evaluate claims of harm from vaccines."
Tests for possible genetic causes of the condition have come back negative for both women. They now have to rely on using birth control pills or patches for hormone replacement. The hearing of their case is set for Thursday and Friday in Washington, D.C.
(http://www.latimes.com)Researchers from the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recently analyzed the foods served by 18 fast food restaurant chains. They took into account every possible combination of menu items for a total of 5,427 meals. Out of the 12 restaurants that offered kid's meals, 11 included a side dish, such as apples, bananas, corn and other fruits and vegetables, that the researchers considered healthy. Also, more than three-quarters of the restaurants offered healthy drink choices, generally milk, juice or bottled water.
The rest of the research turned up less than positive results. Only 33 out of the 5,427 possible meal combinations that could be served to children met the recommended nutrition guidelines set by the Institute of Medicine. That means that less than one percent of the meals would make healthy choices.
This research was significant, because, according to a 2012 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, one-third of children and 41% of teenagers eat fast food daily, the report notes. That can lead to a daily caloric intake increase of 126 for children and 310 for teens, a report in JAMA Pediatrics states.
You can learn more about the nutrition of restaurant meals offered to children and teens and how to make healthy choices by visiting FastFoodMarketing.org.
(http://www.chrisbeatcancer.com)Chris Wark of ChrisBeatCancer.com recently interviewed Isaac Keim, the grandfather of Sarah Hershberger, the 10-year-old Amish girl who has been in the news recently after Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio tried to force her to undergo chemotherapy.
After Sarah was diagnosed with leukemia, she began to receive chemotherapy treatments at Akron Children's Hospital, but both Sarah and her parents decided to discontinue the treatment after her health improved and the therapy became too painful. They have since taken care of her health using nutrition and natural medicine. Akron Children's Hospital, hungry for the money that forcing a little girl into chemotherapy would bring, has been continuously challenging the Hershbergers in court to try to force their poison into the little girl and to give guardianship over her to a nurse that had never even met her. The courts initially ruled in favor of the Hersherbergers' parental rights, but an appeals court overturned that decision.
Now, Sarah has disappeared; she has fled the country with her family in order to avoid being forced into the painful, unnecessary treatment. The hospital was allegedly being paid $1,000,000 to subject Sarah to experimental chemotherapy drugs that aren't even proven to work. In addition to that, they were making money for each round of chemo they put the little girl though.
Wark's interview of Keim gives the family a chance to reveal the truth of the situation in their own words. To listen to the interview and learn more about the Hershbergers' struggle for freedom, justice and Sarah's health, you can visit ChrisBeatCancer.com.
(http://online.wsj.com)According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday decided that trans fats should not be considered safe for use in foods, a drastic change in policy that could lead to a ban on the artery-clogging ingredient.
Trans fats raise bad cholesterol levels, lower good cholesterol levels and increase people's chances of developing heart disease.
"While consumption of potentially harmful artificial trans fat has declined over the last two decades in the United States, current intake remains a significant public health concern," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg stated in a press release. "The FDA's action today is an important step toward protecting more Americans from the potential dangers of trans fat. Further reduction in the amount of trans fat in the American diet could prevent an additional 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year - a critical step in the protection of Americans' health."
The FDA said that food companies would be given 60 days to comment on the proposed action.
(http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org)Drug-resistant infections are quickly becoming a distressing problem for human, driven in large part by an extreme overuse of antibiotics in humans and for livestock production. Now, new research from Tufts University's veterinary school has shown that antibiotic resistance has spread from the hospitals and farms into nature, where it is affecting wildlife.
To learn this, researchers collected around 600 samples of fecal matter from crows from four different states. After analyzing all the poop, they found that about 2.5 percent of the crows sampled had bacteria containing genes that made them resistant to vancomycin, a powerful drug used to treat difficult, hospital-acquired infections. In addition to the bacteria's vancomycin-resistance, they were also resistant to several other antibiotics commonly used in medicine and livestock feed.
The results of this study are truly worrying, as the bacteria's drug-resistance can stem from multiple sources and is hard to determine specifically. The researchers speculated that waste sites may be a potential source of the crows' bacteria. "Because birds are so mobile, it's possible they may acquire resistance genes from multiple sources in their travels," said Julie Ellis, one of the research scientists working on the project. "Maybe they visit a dumpster or sewage treatment plant one day and later a farmer's field."
This new research shows that what humans do in our own artificial environment and how we raise animals on farms can have a great impact on nature, and we need to exercise caution and reduce our use of antibiotics to help protect wildlife and human health and reduce the spread of drug-resistant bacteria.
Writing for National Review Online, Kudlow asks these pertinent questions: "Why is it that Americans don't have the freedom to choose their own health insurance? I just don't get it. Why must the liberal nanny state make decisions for us? We can make them ourselves, thank you very much. It's like choosing a car, buying a home, or investing in a stock. We can handle it.
"So why must the government tell me and everyone else what we can and cannot buy?"
He aptly states, as noted by Charles Krauthammer and The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger, that Obamacare has become the greatest expansion to date of the liberal entitlement-state dream. But that is a dream that he, like many people, does not want. As a healthy 60-something-year-old, he also says, "I don't want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments, or Viagra. I don't want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibilities and with services I don't need or want?
"Why? Because Team Obama says I have to. And that's not much of a reason. It's not freedom."
Obama has for years told the American people that they would be able to keep their health insurance plans if they so choose, but, as recently reported in the media, the Obama administration has known for three years that the "Affordable" Care Act's excessive, inflexible regulations would cause as many as 15 million individuals to lose their coverage.
After that news came out into the open, Obama tried placing the blame on insurance companies, rather than the stiff regulations in his signature legislation. However, it was too late, as the American people, and even facets of the mainstream media, have lost trust in the president and turned against Obamacare.
Kudlow points out the ridiculousness of Obama's statements "that so many of these existing plans are substandard 'bad apples,'" and that insurance at the state level is one of the most regulated areas of the economy. He then goes on to note the complete lack of fairness in Obamacare's attempt to redistribute wealth from the young and healthy to the elderly and diseased.
Kudlow concludes his article thusly: "Between the president's broken promises, the millions of policy cancellations, the continued website breakdowns, and the unaffordable, unfair con game between the healthy young and the sicker old, this Obamacare monster is well on its way to collapsing of its own weight. But here's the bigger point: All this is the inevitable result of massive central-planning exercises to control the economy. That's not freedom.
"No amount of rescue legislation is going to change this. It's the elections of 2014 and 2016 that will allow the American people to reject this Soviet-style planning. But I'll reference my conservative colleagues in the media once again: Obamacare represents the greatest-ever expansion of the liberal entitlement-state dream. And you know what? That dream is crumbling and dissolving before our very eyes.
"And that is freedom."
You can read Larry Kudlow's full article here. More of his articles for National Review are also available to read here.
(http://health.usnews.com)Researchers have published a new study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives detailing how two pesticides classified as "organochlorines" are associated with an increased risk of endometriosis. Endometriosis is a health problem that affects 10 percent of reproductive-age women, or 5 million U.S. women, and causes the tissue lining the uterus to grow outside the uterine cavity; it can cause severe pain and infertility.
Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center analyzed 248 women newly diagnosed with endometriosis and compared them to 538 women without the disease. The study found that those who had greater exposure to two organochlorine pesticides, beta-hexachlorocyclohexane and mirex, had a 30 to 70 percent increased risk of endometriosis.
"We found it interesting that despite organochlorine pesticides being restricted in use or banned in the U.S. for the past several decades, these chemicals were detectable in the blood samples of women in our study and were associated with increased endometriosis risk," the lead author of the study, Kate Upson, PhD, said. "The take-home message from our study is that persistent environmental chemicals, even those used in the past, may affect the health of the current generation of reproductive-age women with regard to a hormonally driven disease."
Victoria Holt, PhD, the study's principal investigator, said, "This research is important, as endometriosis is a serious condition that can adversely affect the quality of a woman's life, yet we still do not have a clear understanding of why endometriosis develops in some women but not in others. Our study provides another piece of the puzzle."
(http://www.wnd.com)Renowned comedian Jackie Mason recently appeared in a radio interview on WABC in New York City. In it, he unleashed a fervently honest attack on President Obama's character and pervasive deceitfulness.
"It's such a ridiculous thing. The whole country's walking around wondering if this guy's really the president of a country. He sounds more like a maniac in an asylum," Mason told radio host Aaron Klein on Sunday night.
"He's saying things that nobody believes. He was always lying every day of his life. Every time he talks it was a lie. The only time he tells the truth is when you didn't hear from him."
"This is becoming so ridiculous, that even the biggest liar can't top himself," Mason said, as quoted by Joe Kovacs on WND.com. "He looks at you straight in the face, and tells you that if you want your plan, you got your plan, you keep your plan. Now, a month-and-a-half later, you got no plan, you lost your plan, and he tells you you still got a plan."
As reported by WND.com, Mason continued, saying, "He has a whole country walking around dizzy wondering who we're listening to. If this is a president of a country, how come he's the only one in America who doesn't seem to know what's going on here?
"Never did I expect a guy like this, the head of a country, to blatantly lie to your face, and then not only lie to your face, then lie about the fact that he never lied. Then lie again about the next lie he told. There used to be a time when you would worship the president, even if you didn't like him. You knew he told the truth because he's the president of a country. Now, he's the only guy in America who would have the nerve to lie this much.
"You say to yourself, 'Wait a second. Who am I listening to? Was this guy actually elected to the presidency? A man who's completely out of his mind, who's out of touch with humanity, with America, who doesn't seem to know what's going on here? Does he read a paper?'
"A guy like this should be locked up ... If he wasn't the president, he'd be in jail or in a sanitarium. He wouldn't be outside talking to people in this condition. He would be considered a danger to his own his own health, to his own life.
"The latest is that it's only 5 percent of the people, only 15 [or] 20 million people who are going to lose their plan. ... What if you shoot a guy? He's only one person out of 300 million. How come it's in the paper that you shot an innocent person and you go to jail for it? ... Since when do you destroy people and it doesn't count because it's too small a percentage?"
You can visit WND.com to listen to the entire interview, and more episodes of Aaron Klein's investigative radio program are available at his WND.com page.
(http://www.alternet.org)Most Americans have probably never heard of ractopamine, so you may be surprised to learn that it is used in 80 percent of US pig and cattle farming operations. Ractopamine is a growth additive drug, known as a beta-agonist, that is widely banned in other countries, but in the US, it is marketed as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys.
The effects that ractopamine has on animals is already known, but its effects on humans are still a mystery. A European study in which one participant dropped out due to adverse effects found that " ractopamine causes elevated heart rates and heart-pounding sensations in humans," the Center for Food Safety (CFS) said. Other studies have shown that the drug causes rapid heart beat, birth defects and enlarged hearts in animals. Countryside magazine has reported cases of pigs being too weak to walk and their hooves falling off after being given ractopamine.
Being understandably concerned with these disturbing reports, the CFS and the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) have requested information "documenting, analyzing, or otherwise discussing the physiological, psychological, and/or behavioral effects" of ractopamine from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA has around 100,000 pages on the drug, but they have refused to produce more than 464 pages that have already been previously released. Distraught over the administration's illegal withholding and concealment of vital public health and safety information, the CFS and ALDF have decided to sue the FDA over the matter.
Ractopamine is banned in the EU, Russia, China, Taiwan and many other countries that actually care about their citizens' health. This drug's continued use closes American meat producers out of those foreign markets and likely puts consumers in danger. Hopefully, the CFS and ALDF will succeed in their fight, and the American justice system will force the FDA to release information about ractopamine, protect consumers and actually do its job instead of idly and flagrantly wasting our tax dollars and our time.
(http://www.breitbart.com)As most people know, President Obama has repeatedly assured Americans that, if they like their health insurance plan, they would be able to keep it. He didn't say "if it meets certain conditions" or any other qualifiers. Now, his claims are turning out to be blatant lies, as many incensed and soon-to-be uninsured Americans are finding out. He repeated this lie throughout his 2012 re-election campaign and has probably told it to us hundreds of times since 2009. On Wednesday, he told those losing their insurance coverage to "shop around," presumably on the unreliable, broken, crashing Healthcare.gov website. New York Magazine has put together a video of 23 different occasions where Obama had openly made this false promise, so we can now plainly see his shameless, constant deception of the American public exposed.
(http://www.cnn.com)With bans on large soda sizes and oppressive gun control laws, New York City seems obsessed with restricting freedoms and telling its residents how they should live. And now, the New York City Council has just approved a new measure to continue the expansion of government control. On Wednesday, the council voted to approve a new anti-tobacco law that will raise the legal purchasing age of tobacco from 18 to 21.
The bill, known as "Tobacco 21," will also affect electronic cigarettes and was approved along with the "Sensible Tobacco Enforcement" bill, which, according to CNN, "will prohibit discounts on tobacco products and increase enforcement on vendors who attempt to evade taxes."
"By increasing the smoking age to 21, we will help prevent another generation from the ill health and shorter life expectancy that comes with smoking," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement on Wednesday.
While it is true that cigarettes represent a significant threat to public health, they much more affect the consumers who make the conscious choice to smoke them. Smoking leads to many potentially deadly health conditions, including emphysema, bronchitis, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and several types of cancer. However, tobacco products are not the only consumer items that cause chronic, health-debilitating diseases. Children at any age are able to go and purchase an artery-clogging hamburger from McDonald's. Anyone is completely free to engorge themselves on aspartame, high fructose corn syrup and carcinogenic artificial dyes in Pepsi and Coca-Cola's sodas. Now, New York has decided that 18-year-olds are mature enough to get married, kill babies (through abortion), join the military and kill people from other countries, or die trying, drive a two-ton, speeding hunk of metal down a crowded street and vote for elected officials, but they apparently don't possess the critical thinking skills necessary to decide whether to smoke a cigarette or not.
While it is one thing to restrict smoking in public places, which might actually protect public health, it is an entirely different matter to restrict a person's freedom and tell an adult that they are no longer allowed to make their own health decisions. Especially if they were to exercise that choice privately, in a way that doesn't even affect anyone else.
