Precipitous Rise of Kidney Stones in US Children
Oct 29 at 5:05pm by Aileen
More Melamine in Chinese Food Products
It seems like the entire month of October has been one big Halloween Trick (not Treat) as the grotesque and blatantly illegal ‘melamine in food’ imported from China horror just keeps getting worse and worse. Some might wonder why all food products from China weren’t immediately banned back when tainted pet food cause the painful deaths of thousands of dogs and cats last year, once it was confirmed that Chinese state-owned food processors were adding the industrial plastic to wheat gluten to fool tests for protein content in this ubiquitous protein additive. Alas, imports were not banned, and now this dangerous adulterant is in hundreds of common food items.
Thousands of Chinese infants were poisoned when melamine was added to infant formulas and milk products. It’s in medicines exported and has caused sickness and death in Central and South America. Now it’s in candy and eggs and almost every wheat product from China. The US does not require country of origin labeling of foods, thus American consumers have no real way of knowing they’re buying poison.
Tainted Chinese Products Criminal Timeline traces the tainted Chinese food scandal back through 2004, and includes many other adulterants Americans have been ingesting. Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. It is not a pretty picture, and our FDA has been criminally lax in their duty of protecting the safety of our food supply.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Real Help for Real Headaches
Oct 13 at 6:06pm by Aileen
I don’t know about you, but in my family there is an unfortunate tendency to develop serious headaches. Two sisters have suffered migraines since childhood, my daughter gets them too, and her son has fairly regular headaches that end up sending him to his bed in pain. Lots of people get headaches not quite so severe, and various headache remedies have become part of urban legend lore as well as accounting for billions of dollars’ worth of pharmaceutical company profits over the years.
Sometimes it’s not just a matter of “take two aspirin, call me in the morning.” Luckily, Stephanie over at the blog One Big Health Nut has researched a total of 23 Ways To Get Rid Of & Prevent Headaches. These have solid science behind them and links to demonstrate that, so it’s definitely a blog post worthy of checking out and keeping in your bookmarks if you or anyone in your family suffers from debilitating headaches.
I was gratified to see that our own long-time “family recipes” are indeed supported by good science. Such as drinking lots of water, dehydration being a cause of headaches. Limiting caffine and alcohol, eating regularly and staying away from fried foods too. The only thing missing that I would add to the list is one that Stephanie semi-includes. She advises that a paste of cinnamon and water applied to the brow and temples can help relieve headaches, and this is supported enough to use if you can. The same idea using hot pepper powder has worked well in my own family, the capsaicin stimulating scalp circulation. Which I presume is the method that works with cinnamon paste.
This very useful resource is excellent, so do keep it on file!
Popularity: 15% [?]
Comments OffContinue Reading
Addicted To Your Baby’s Smile
Jul 8 at 3:03pm by Aileen
Most parents know very well how heart-warming their baby’s smile can be, to the point where just doing something silly to get that smile-fix becomes a regular way of life. I’ve heard all sorts of weird philosophies about baby smiles – “it’s just gas,” “they’ve got the intelligence of rats,” etc., etc., things that only non-parents would ever think of.
So it’s cool that researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine have finally demonstrated the addictive quality of baby smiles, as reported recently in the journal Pediatrics. Turns out that baby smiles actually ‘light up’ the reward centers of the human brain, particularly in Moms – it’s what they call a “Natural High.”
Baby’s Smile Is A Natural High
The researchers hope their work will help scientists understand the unique mother-infant bonding so critical for proper child development (and mothers’ mental health).
No doubt this is fine research, and it’s gratifying to know that science is actually looking at phenomena they could have known all along if they’d just asked a Mom. Oh, well. That famous scientific skepticism needs physical ‘proof’ of physical phenomena before it will believe anything most regular people know from direct empirical experience. Maybe they’ll now come up with a pill that mimics this high, which will no doubt be a big item on the black market for pharmaceuticals…
Popularity: 16% [?]
Big Pharma’s Big Lie Refuted
Jan 8 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.
Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs – and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases – can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.
Popularity: 9% [?]
RECENT COMMENTS