I’m making some aesthetic changes to the site and things might look a little strange for a couple of days. I’m trying to make the content more accessible and readable. Also, I’m going to add some ads to the margins. The mission and integrity of HH remains unchanged. Thank you for your patience.

HPV Mandate Moving in Illinois: The Land of Lincoln has the dubious distinction of joining a couple dozen states looking to mandate the HPV vaccine. The legislature is holding a hearing on the bill today. It would require all 11-year-olds to be vaccinated unless their parents sign a waver after receiving some propaganda from the state about the vaccine, HPV and cervical cancer. This is hardly a consolation as I trust the state health department about as far as I could throw them to provide completely honest information (read: not supplied by Merck) on the risks of HPV vis-à-vis the risks of the vaccine. If you’re an Illinois resident, here is the contact information for your representatives and senators. Chicago Tribune

“The Future of Food”: There is a great 90-min. documentary on YouTube about what’s happening to our food supply and how it threatens our health and very way of life. The filmmakers document the unlabeled, genetically engineered foods that have made their way into our bodies almost without notice. It’s a tough, in-depth investigation and the kind of journalism that should be on TV instead of the distractingly endless coverage of celebrity infotainment. This is what’s really going on in the world, and it’s worth skipping a night in front of the tube to watch. YouTube

“Warning: Merck’s Vaccine Is Hazardous to the Truth”: A short article by Pam Martens over at MomsRising does a good job of summarizing Merck’s (and, by extension, the media’s) fraudulent claim that Gardasil is an “anti-cancer” vaccine when the raw trial data shows nothing of the sort.

What has gone largely unnoticed, except for a few sharp eyed doctors and researchers, is that these strains of HPV take 8 to 12 years or longer to develop into cancer and Merck has studied women in its clinical trials for less than five years. Because its test candidates “had normal baseline pelvic examinations” when the clinical trials began and were not likely to develop cervical cancer for 8 to 12 years, Merck has, essentially, created a vaccine that has proven to be 100% effective in preventing what isn’t there.” MomsRising

How to store your butter, beer, milk and olive oil: Yes, it matters. I keep my butter in the pantry because no one likes hard butter (and I use a stick every other day or so), but the kind of container determines everything from taste to health properties. Same is true of milk, beer and olive oil. The common thread? All are sensitive to light. And all should be stored in the dark, either in dark glass containers or otherwise away from light. Another reason to give up milk from the grocery store. Curious Cook

Raw milk testimonials: Our government really wants to take this stuff away? Dave Gumpert has another excellent post on raw milk, this one focusing on the health miracles it has brought to countless families. The stories really are amazing, and it seems any government that would willingly take away the right to drink this wonderfood (unless you have your own cow, of course), is not one that cares about its people. The Complete Patient

Parents rightfully outraged by slanted vaccine coverage on 20/20: John Stossel did a piece for ABC’s program 20/20 this week on how various groups and internet sites (ahem) are scaring parents silly about vaccinating their children, and how diseases are going up, etc etc etc. Well, the response to this could consume me for days or weeks, but let’s just leave it at this: What if its the CDC/FDA/media/doctors who are unnecessarily scaring parents into believing their children really are at serious risk from dying or getting seriously ill from these diseases? Why is it that the vast, vast majority of kids falling ill to these “vaccine-preventable” disease are fully vaccinated? Pray tell me, are parents over reacting when it’s becoming more readily apparent that the most heavily vaccinated among us are also the most likely to be chronically ill? What is the harm in giving people a choice? If the vaccines are so damn safe and effective, why do they have to be required as a condition of getting an education? And if they work so well, why are my unvaccinated kids a threat to anyone but themselves? Why is it that the incidents and death rates from “vaccine-preventable” diseases plummeted long before the respective vaccines were introduced? Why are the industry and government so interested in covering this information up? Those are just the beginning of the questions I want answered. Stossel might have asked all the wrong ones, but at least he alerted more to the fact that a controversy exists. Boy, does it. NVIC

I realize the title of this post is somewhat of an oxymoron, especially if you have been keeping up with the acrylamide issue, yet here we are, fallible human beings sometimes looking for a quick fix of what only can sadly be described as America’s favorite food (and no, it’s not a vegetable).

Fried in high temperatures, the glucose and asparagine in potatoes form a highly toxic carcinogen. But besides avoiding potato chips and french fries all together (which, admittedly, even this health nut has trouble doing sometimes), there is something you can do. Try soaking raw potatoes in hot water (at least 158 degrees) for 40 minutes before cooking. According to an article I just dug out of a September 2004 Organic Style magazine, this simple effort will reduce the acrylamide level by 90 percent.

I found the following in a book about Kombucha (an ancient fermented Chinese tea that has incredible healing properties), and I thought it was worth retyping. It is translated from the original Danish by the authors of the Kombucha book, and I think it’s an apt summary of disease. If you read closely, I think it also prescribes a path to cure for every dysfunction of the body:

Biopati — en vej til sundhed (Biopathy — a way to health)

by Kurt Winberg-Nielsen, Narayana Press; Gylling, Denmark; 1982

What is sickness? Sickness is the situation which appears when the body is subject to load or strain which exceeds its regulation capacity.

This is a deceptively simple definition which can explain a large number of physical symptoms of sickness. When the regulation capacity is over-extended the body gets sick. The symptoms are an appropriate reaction to the strain. The symptoms are a survival mechanism which gives the body a chance to outlive the strain, which otherwise would be fatal.

The main forms of stress come in the form of toxins (environmental, stimulants, medicines), deficiencies and mental stress. Toxins put a load on the system, while vitamin and mineral deficiencies reduce the regulation capacity. Mental stress strains the body and at the same time reduces the regulation capacity. Lessening these forms of stress can help to restore your health.

Monsanto knowingly dumped highly toxic wastes in Great Britain: The St. Louis-based chemical company keeps making the pharmaceutical companies blush in terms of straight-up evildoerness. And, as is usually the case in such deathly shenanigans, the government likely helped them cover it up. It happened 30 years ago, but humans and wildlife will be paying for it, with disease and taxpayer money, for decades more. Monsanto apparently paid contractors to illegally dump thousands of tons of extremely toxic waste into British landfills, and the chemicals are still polluting groundwater and the atmosphere. The 67 chemicals so far found by the British environmental agency include: Agent Orange derivatives, dioxins and PCBs, all of which could have been made only by Monsanto. A pollution expert quoted in the story said: “The authorities have known about the situation for years, but have done nothing. There is evidence of not only negligence and utter incompetence, but cover-up, and the problem has grown unchecked.” Guardian

WHO takes payments from drug companies, according to BMJ: The February 17 issue of the British Medical Journal reports on payments the World Health Organization has allegedly taken from pharmaceutical companies, compromising the supposedly independent organization’s mission. According to the prestigious journal, the paper trail raises “serious questions” about the WHO’s commitment to its own internal rules. The following is a summary from the What Doctors Don’t Tell You monthly newsletter:

The WHO was prepared to accept a $10,000 ‘donation’ from drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), provided the money was sent via a patients group for Parkinson’s sufferers. E-mails between the WHO’s mental health department and the European Parkinson’s Disease Association (EPDA) in June last year suggest that the practice was fairly common. The WHO had asked for the money to help fund a report on neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, and for which GSK produces treatments.

In one of the e-mails from the WHO to EPDA’s Mary Baker, it was suggested that the money “should be given to EPDA and eventually EPDA can send the funds to WHO, which will give an invoice (and acknowledge contribution) to EPDA, but not GSK. This is in line with what we have done with other contributions.”

But GSK was so outraged it would not be acknowledged as the donor that it withdrew the funding offer. Its sensitivity to the issue also highlights the very close relationship that exists between drug companies and patients’ groups. One commentator, Dr Tim Reid, of Health Action International, says: “Patients’ groups are so close to the industry that they might as well be taking their money straight out of the drug company advertising budgets.”

Graham Dukes, a former WHO employee, commented: “We know that patient groups are heavily influenced by drug companies. In the case of attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), for example, we know that the industry effectively financed the whole campaign – and we’re not absolutely sure the condition actually exists.”

When asked about the exchange, a spokesman for WHO said that the emails were “clumsily worded.” Yea, as in, we usually don’t get caught. BMJ

Whoops, heart drug doubles mortality within five years: A study in the February 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that a drug widely used after coronary artery surgery to reduce bleeding has the “side effect” of killing 20 percent of the people are given it. In a study of 4,374 heart patients, a full 50 percent more patients were dead in five years after taking the drug versus controls. Furthermore, the drug was directly associated with the deaths of 20 percent of the people who received it during trials. The drug is Aprotinin, and last year it was given to 246,000 Americans during surgery. It’s been on the market for 13 years, and long known to cause kidney problems, as well as a slew of heart problems unrelated to the original condition. JAMA

“FDA Runs Protection Racket for Big Pharma”: Evelyn Pringle wrote a great piece last month on how the FDA doesn’t work for you. She discusses the notorious protection scheme put in place in the form of a preemption policy that bans private lawsuits against drug companies in state courts once a drug and its label have been approved by the FDA, a regulatory end-run around your legal rights. A feight completed entirely outside of the legislative process, the FDA declared itself the sole authority on whether drugs are harmful or not. Given that the FDA is literally run by drug-company donations, this is a very scary prospect, indeed. OpEd News

The firestorm continues in Texas: More and more reporting continues to come out about Gov. Perry’s executive order requiring girls to be vaccinated for HPV. Turns out he was secretly working with the health department to draft it for months (which is worse than it sounds, because the agency that was going to enforce the mandate is the one that wrote it, a good-governance taboo), and staffers were worried that the press release accompanying the announcement sounded “like a Merck commercial.” Statesman

NVIC releases Gardasil report: The vaccine-awareness group released its comprehensive report on the HPV vaccine last week. It’s a must-read if you are even thinking about vaccinating your daughter or getting the shot yourself. There are many worthy points, but perhaps none more than this one: “And doctors who give GARDASIL in combination with other vaccines are basically conducting an experiment on their young patients because Merck has not published any safety data for simultaneous vaccination with any vaccine except hepatitis B vaccine.” Believe it or not, these kind of experiments are conducted in doctors’ office every single day in this country, as vaccines are given in combinations that have never, I repeat never, been tested. NVIC

Monsanto’s growth hormones being rejected more and more: The Safeway and Chipotle chains have announced that their foods will be free of rBGH. Consumers are waking up to this debacle and demanding milk that isn’t compromised with these scary hormones. You still have to read labels, however, and make sure the product states “rBGH free,” as the FDA doesn’t mandate that companies employing the genetically modified artificial hormones label their products as such. What to watch for: How is Monsanto going to respond to the abandonment of one of the company’s leading products? Don’t expect the tactics to be honest. Organic Consumers Association

The federal government’s legal case against raw milk: Dave Gumpert has a really great post on what the government — my government, your government — has to hold over raw milk producers. The Complete Patient (Still unsure about drinking raw milk or giving it to your kids? You’re missing out. Check out this page on the Weston A. Price Foundation site.)

We’ve all been told at least a thousand times that saturated fat is bad, bad, bad and unsaturated fat, especially polyunsaturated fat is great. Well, like most parts of conventional medical wisdom these days, it’s likely wrong.

According to a 1994 study in the Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, the fatty acids found in artery clogs are mostly unsaturated — 74 percent of them, in fact. Of those, 41 percent are polyunsaturated. (source: Felton, C V, et al, Lancet, 1994, 344:1195-96)

For more sources on this subject, see footnote 31 from the Weston A. Price article, “The Skinny on Fats.” The article itself is especially illustrative.

So I’m trying something new here at HH, and I’d like to know how you like it. I got the idea from the talented folks over at Ethicurian, and I’m hoping it may make it easier to sift through the days’ news as it relates to health. Periodically, I plan to list relevant items in short format, with a link to the story. I hope this way I will be able to cover more in a smaller space, bring you the information you are most interested in and free up some of my time to work on original reporting.

With that, here is the news for today:

Corn no longer so cheap — good news for our collective health: Andrew Leonard, in his fabulous column How the World Works, ponders what happens to the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in the United States now that ethanol production is starting to crowd out the availability of cheap, heavily subsidized corn for the likes of Coca Cola and just about every food manufacturer. Now, I’m no fan of ethanol, as many studies have shown it uses more petroleum to produce than it saves from being put in cars, but putting corn in cars could be good news for our bodies. Salon

Morford on the shockingly ignorant and callous Americans: Mark Morford spends his column today hilariously but seriously discussing the fact that a full 13 percent of Americans have never even heard of global warming. Seriously. And in a bizarre twist of statistics from a recent survey, only 13 percent of Congressional Republicans believe that humans are causing it, all evidence to the contrary. The ACNielsen poll of 49 countries also found that Americans ranked last in their concern for the planet, despite being the climate’s worst offender. As usual, Morford helps us laugh to keep from crying. San Francisco Chronicle

CBS does a relatively straight story on the health benefits of raw milk: Although they couched it in the more politically palatable discussion of probiotics, it’s very cool that one of the networks covered this story for real. The Evening News reported on how California dairies (where selling it is legal, unlike most of the country) can’t keep the stuff in stock. CBS News (also see Dave Gumpert’s coverage at The Complete Patient)

The Wal-Mart of the restaurant industry: A company you have never even heard of has now almost completely monopolized the restaurant supply industry, and it means that the spinach dip you eat in your local diner is exactly the same one I’m eating in mine. Even fine restaurants are passing off Sysco’s prepackaged offerings as their own “homemade” dishes. This has been one of the great untold stories of what you eat for some time, and kudos to Ulrich Boser for noticing. Slate

More news on the HPV vaccine battles in the states: The CDC has determined that the 542 adverse reactions so far reported after girls received the new vaccine do not merit further inquiry. Remember that only 1 in 10 or as few of 1 in 100 reactions are actually reported. The Hindu

Almost half of Kentuckians surveyed said they were opposed to mandating that the state’s pre-teen girls be vaccinated with HPV as a condition for attending school. “I’m not going to play around with my child’s health,” said Marie Mazzotta, a mother of an 11-year-old girl. Courier-Journal

Down in Texas, momentum continues to build in the state legislature to repeal Gov. Perry’s executive order making Texas the first state to require the shots (which would effect in 2008). The House Committee on Public Health voted 6-3 to prohibit state health officials from barring girls from attending school without being vaccinated for HPV. Even though the full chamber isn’t expected to take up the legislation until March, the legislation already has 90 co-sponsors, more than half of the 150-member body. Star-Telegram

USA Today had an article last week on the practice of deep-ocean fishing, which depletes stocks of very old fish, which if left unabated, will mean those species simply cannot recover:

With declining catches close to shore, commercial fishing is turning to deeper waters, threatening species that live in the cold and gloom of the deep oceans, according to researchers. A panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said Sunday that overfishing in deep waters is putting at risk the least sustainable of all fish stocks.

“We’re not really fishing there. We’re mining there. We’re taking what appears to be a renewable resource and turning it into a non-renewable one,” said Elliott Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Wash. …

Some deep species don’t mature until they are 40 years old and then may live 240 years, Norse said.

Such fish reproduce slowly, Heppell said — for example while skipjack tuna may spawn every day in summer, deep-living orange roughy spawn only every two years.

“Never eat anything that could be older than your grandmother,” she said, quoting Milton Love of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

There’s another reason not to eat these large, slow-growing fish — they have much more time to accumulate pollutants in their bodies, which go straight into yours. Numerous recent studies on methyl mercury and PCB’s have link these toxins in fish with an array of chronic illnesses, birth defects, and memory loss.

The Pew Oceans Commission, part of the Pew Charitable Trusts, first brought the idea of oceans “in crisis” into the public eye in 2003 with its report, America’s Living Oceans. That same year a paper in the journal Nature revealed that up to 90 percent of the stocks required to sustain the ocean’s primary predators (bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod) are now wiped out.
What can you do that benefits both your health and the environment? Go small (sardines and mackerel), vegetarian (tilapia, carp and catfish), young and line caught. And skip the tuna. For more on that and a wonderful tribute to the bounty of the sea, see this post.