Archive for April, 2006

Top Ten Reasons Never To Consume Soft Drinks!

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

1. Soft drinks steal water from the body. They work very much like a diuretic which takes away more water than it provides to the body. Just to process the high levels of sugar in soft drinks steals a considerable amount of water from the body. To replace the water stolen by soft drinks, you need to drink 8-12 glasses of water for every one glass of soft drinks that you consume!

2. Soft Drinks never quench your thirst, certainly not your body's need for water. Constantly denying your body an adequate amount can lead to Chronic Cellular Dehydration, a condition that weakens your body at the cellular level. This, in turn, can lead to a weakened immune system and a plethora of diseases.

3. The elevated levels of phosphates in soft drinks leach vital minerals from your body. Soft Drinks are made with purified water that also leach vital minerals from your body. A severe lack of minerals can lead to Heart Disease (lack of magnesium), Osteoporosis (lack of calcium) and many other diseases. Most vitamins can not perform their function in the body without the presence of minerals.

4. Soft Drinks can remove rust from a car bumper or other metal surfaces. Imagine what it's doing to your digestive tract as well as the rest of your body.

5. The high amounts of sugar in Soft Drinks causes your pancreas to produce an abundance of insulin, which leads to a "sugar crash". Chronic elevation and depletion of sugar and insulin can lead to diabetes and other imbalance related diseases. This is particularly disruptive to growing children which can lead to life-long health problems.

6. Soft Drinks severely interfere with digestion. Caffeine and high amounts of sugar virtually shut down the digestive process. That means your body is essentially taking in NO nutrients from the food you may have just eaten, even that eaten hours earlier. Consumed with french-fries which can take WEEKS to digest, there is arguably nothing worse a person can put in their body.

7. Diet soft drinks contain Aspartame, which has been linked to depression, insomnia, neurological disease and a plethora of other illness. The FDA has received more than 10,000 consumer complaints about Aspartame, that's 80% of all complaints about food additives.

8. Soft Drinks are EXTREMELY acidic, so much so that they can eat through the liner of an aluminum can and leach aluminum from the can if it sits on the shelf too long. Alzheimer patients who have been autopsied ALL have high levels of aluminum in their brains. Heavy metals in the body can lead to many neurological and other diseases.

9. Soft Drinks are EXTREMELY acidic: The human body naturally exists at a pH of about 7.0. Soft Drinks have a pH of about 2.5, which means you are putting something into your body that is hundred of thousands of times more acidic that your body is! Diseases flourish in an acidic environment. Soft Drinks and other acidic food deposit acid waste in the body which accumulates over time in the joints and around the organs. For example, the Body pH of cancer or arthritis patients are always low. The sicker the person, the lower the Body pH.

10. Soft Drinks are the WORST THING you can possibly put in your body. Don't even think of taking a sip of a Soft Drink when you are sick with a cold, flu or something worse. It will only make it that much harder for your body to fight the illness.

Benzene in soft drinks warrants FDA warning

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
softdrinks2

Suzanne Havala Hobbs , Correspondent

Benzene is in some soft drinks and other beverages sold in the United States , many of them consumed regularly by children.

That simple statement alone should be enough to prompt swift and serious action by the federal government.

It hasn't.

Drinks containing as much as 27 times the federal limit for benzene in drinking water have been found on supermarket shelves, according to the most recent government data publicly available -- from the Food and Drug Administration's Total Diet Study, which examined contaminant levels in beverages sold between 1995 and 2001.

How can that be?

As I wrote last month, the FDA learned nearly 15 years ago that two ingredients -- ascorbic acid and sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate -- can interact in products and form benzene, a carcinogen. Certain conditions -- heat and light -- can accelerate benzene production in drinks.

In the early 1990s, after first learning of this problem, FDA entrusted industry to take voluntary steps to reduce the benzene content of beverages. No public announcement was made.

I spoke last week with Mike Redman, vice president for scientific, technical and regulatory affairs for the American Beverage Association. Redman also worked as a soft drink industry representative in the early 1990s and discussed the issue of benzene contamination with FDA officials then.

Redman said that back then FDA did not dictate specific steps for reducing benzene in drinks.

"The agreement was, because FDA is not product formulators, either, and they'll be the first to tell you that, that they left that up to the industry to determine the best ways for the individual products to lower those benzene levels," Redman said.

Whatever the agreement was between FDA and the soft drink industry, the problem hasn't been fixed.

Recent independent laboratory tests have found benzene in soft drinks at levels higher than 5 parts per billion, the maximum level allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency in drinking water.

As a result, FDA has begun testing soft drinks again for benzene. However, the agency isn't releasing the data to the public.

"To release all the data now could be confusing," Laura Tarantino, the FDA's director of food additive safety, told the Associated Press. "It's not only not good for companies; it's not particularly good for consumers. It doesn't give them any useful information. One of the misperceptions is that anytime you see ascorbic acid and benzoate, you're going to automatically have high levels of benzene, and that just isn't so."

It may certainly be true that not all drinks containing the combination of ascorbic acid and benzoates also contain benzene. But we do know now that some of them do -- and at levels that would require sharp warnings if it were in your drinking water.

In our modern, industrialized world it may be impossible to avoid all exposures to contaminants such as benzene. The biggest benzene exposures for most people come when filling up a gas tank or driving in heavy traffic.

But that doesn't excuse the presence of a toxic, cancer-causing substance in a manufactured product that's entirely optional in our diets.

Without attention to this problem from the media and our elected representatives, FDA and the soft drink industry are likely to reach another ineffective and soon-to-be-neglected gentlemen's agreements.

In which case, consider this column your warning label.

Why the “Quack Watchers” Need to be Watched

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

We've all seen the websites of the self-proclaimed debunkers of faux science and other myths. They explain to us that, except for the things we personally know to be true, everything we believe to be true is completely false. Almost every rumor we have heard turns out to be an urban myth when it comes to the Quack Watchers and other debunkers. And if something that they denounced turns out to be true, not another word is ever said about it and the debunking web page is quietly removed.

What quack watchers do best is plant doubt in our minds when we are trying to search out the truth about something such as a health issue. It's easy to be a skeptic. It's hard to be a believer and even harder to believe in things that others regularly ridicule. Quack Watchers often have a chilling effect on an open debate because of the way they often scoff at the issues they are challenging.

As a whole, we tend to believe the Quack Watchers because we want to believe that we can't be so easily fooled. And it's reassuring for us to believe that we are not so easily fooled. We enjoy hearing that the things that may sound a little weird or too good to be true of course could not be true. The most dangerous debunkers are the ones who have a background in science, but little or no experience at all with the subject that they are debunking. Many of the de-bunkers tend to be heavy on their opinion and light on the facts. In fact, they quite often present their opinion as gospel. For instance, when the interpretation of a photo is in question, their analysis is offered as fact, the final report.

I don't expect the de-bunkers to go away. But we need to understand that many of the claims some have made are no more than one more opinion, not the Last Word. What bothers me is that so many of the debunkers serve nothing more than to confuse us. However, it becomes unsettling when we're trying to determine the truth about crucial issues such as our health.

Quack Watchers denounce Lorraine Day, M.D. because she dares challenge the medical establishment and tell people that we can heal ourselves if we live on the right diet and have faith in God. They conclude from their Debunkdoms that someone is a crank when in fact they are someone they simply have profound differences with.

When a radical scientific concept is first introduced, there is commonly resistance to it by the prevailing scientific community of the time. New ideas are commonly ridiculed and derided because people become comfortable with ideas and they don't want to change. Often, the members of the established community must die off so a new generation can be raised with the new concept and accept it from the beginning without any unnecessarily hand-wringing about what they once embraced as the truth that has now been shown to be superceded by the next wave of discovery. The new concept will no longer be described as radical.

My problem with one Quack Watcher is his ridiculous denunciation of Ionized Water as snake oil when, if fact, a staggering amount of research has been done on the effects of Ionized Water , which is produced by running filtered tap water over positive and negative electrodes that produce positive and negative ions in the water that are then separated. Thus, ionization produces two different waters at the same time, one alkaline the other acid.

All of the research done has arrived at the same conclusion: Ionized Water benefits everything it comes in contact with as long as its used correctly. (For instance, don't drink acid water.) The Quack Watchers who denounce Ionized Water could not be more wrong about it since Ionized Water is one of the most phenomenal inventions of the 20th century for a number of reasons.

Their first mistake is to suggest that only purified water be consumed. Purified water is water without minerals produced by reverse osmosis (RO) or distillation. I have written extensively myself against the practice consuming purified water.

Water Ionizers are designed to be used with your tap water or bottled water. If you attempt to ionize purified, de-mineralized water, you will not get a change in pH nor will the ORP (oxidation reduction potential) change. Minerals must be present in the water for ionization to take place. With water that contains minerals, ionization changes both of these properties, pH and ORP. Read my article on Ionized Water for a more detailed explanation of its properties.

Ionized Water is very alkaline and helps balance the body's pH. It is crucial to point out characteristic when it comes to those who would denounce Ionized Water because we must consume substances that are alkaline to maintain a balanced body pH. Few substances are more alkaline than Ionized Water with an adjustable pH of between 8 and 10 . When we acidify ourselves with a processed food diet and a stressful lifestyle, we open ourselves up to every disease imaginable. At a pH of 10, Ionized Water is 100 times more alkaline than the body should be at pH 7. To conclude that consuming a substance which is 100 times more alkaline than the body ought to be is not beneficial to our health is to demonstrate you know nothing about Ionized Water and body pH. The average person is much more acidic than she/he ought to be. Bodily acidity is the door to disease, the unraveling of our health. To ignore the incredible life-saving potentia l that high pH Ionized Water has to raise our overall body pH is to ignore the facts. Therefore, we need to put extremely alkaline substances into our body in order to offset this incredible acidity we create through poor diet, pollution and stress. Ionized Water has been demonstrated over and over again to raise body pH. How could it not? When we constantly consume soft drinks, which are extremely acid (pH 2.5 ~ approximately 50,000 times more acid than ideal body pH 7.0), we are dropping our body pH. When we consume Ionized Water slowly we raise our body pH until we are in homeostasis or balance.

The Quack Watcher states that the term Ionized Water is meaningless to him. Is he suggesting that ionization, a scientific principle, doesn't exist? Or is he admitting that he doesn't know what ionization is? Whether we believe in Ionized Water or not is irrelevant because it is a physical fact that cannot be denied. We can argue philosophy, but not physics and Ionized Water is chemistry and physics and what it does for the body and for our health is undeniable.

He suggests that Ionized Water is simply a placebo , something that we believe is going to change our health when in fact our mind is doing all the work. In other words, Ionized Water has no physiological affect on the body, only a psychological one, which certainly is not the case. Ionized Water balances the body pH and is a powerful antioxidant, hydrator and detoxifier.

This is our first clue that the debunker understands little if anything about Ionized Water. To ionize means to gain or lose an electron and water that has been ionized is water that has these characteristics, that of either having an extra or missing electron. We know this is true by the physical scientific measurements we can make regarding Ionized Water. We can measure changes that ionization causes with both a pH meter and ORP meter. On the alkaline side, the pH is elevated and the ORP is driven into the negative range, which counteracts the oxidation of the body when we consume it.

Tim Bolen runs a website called quackpotwatch.org that has dared to challenge these websites that denounce practically ANYTHING that is not wholly accepted by the medical establishment. In the world of the quack watchers, nothing in the universe is provable unless a double-blind study has been done on it. I often point out that there is absolutely no evidence of chronic disease in the wild, meaning that wild animals do not contract chronic diseases such as cancer, arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. I have challenged people to show me evidence of any chronic disease in the wild and no one has yet to produce any. Do we need a double-blind study to determine the obvious? Other than universities, the only industry capable and willing to perform double-blind studies is the pharmaceutical industry. Double-blind studies are enormously expensive, costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. The pharmaceutical indu stry is able to afford expensive studies such as these because it is very profitable for them. Studies lead to the release of medical drugs for all kinds of disease that make pharmaceuticals a lot of money. If taking drugs to control disease is the path that you have chosen so be it. But drugs and medicine do not lead to health. Alternative health and Wellness protocols are often natural and inexpensive. And since no one stands to make much money from them, double-blind studies are never done on "alternative cures" such as Ionized Water. Another example is the fact that I recommend people move toward a Raw Food Diet, which doesn't cost much at all for someone to do. However, since no one is ever going to make large amounts of money from promoting raw foods, double-blind studies are never done.

The reason debunkers and quackwatchers spend their time on these websites is because they can be quite profitable. They appear as "expert witnesses" in lawsuits and they collect large fees for doing so. In essence, the intentions of quackwatchers are not to expose scams and fraud, but to denounce anything that the American Medical Association has not blessed. The Medical establishment can say and suggest almost anything and not worry about being challenged on it.

The detoxification effects alone are enough to make you realize that Ionized Water is not like any other water you will ever consume. Ionizing water changes the water molecule grouping structure so it is much smaller, hexagonal in shape, and therefore far more penetrating to body tissue and hydrating. And as it hydrates your body tissue, it pushes out all the things that do not belong in the body, which are commonly known as toxins . How water molecules group together is another thing that debunkers like to state does not happen and is so much more quackery, when in fact a huge amount of scientific research has been done on water-molecule clusters .

The debunker of Ionized Water who is found on the Internet could not have gotten it more wrong in every regard. He is a retired chemistry professor from Simon Fraser University in Canada and if he had bothered to examine the properties of Ionized Water he would have found that they are exactly as I describe them to be. He also would have found that they do exactly what I say they do inside the body. He discredits himself immensely when he states that Ionized Water is simply "snake-oil on tap". History will humiliate him and Simon Fraser University should denounce any association with him. If they do not, then they are complicit in his denouncement of one of the greatest health advances in human history.

Those that would attack Ionized Water as being a hoax of some sort do not understand how important it is that we consume substances that are negatively charged and possess negative ions. Those who debunk Ionized Water have never consumed it. None that I have seen have ever read my first book, Confessions of a Body Builder, nor excerpts from my second book, Achieving Great Health in 90 Days or Less. In my eight years of studying and consuming Ionized Water (1.5 – 2.0 gallons per day), I have never found anything that Ionized Water doesn't enhance and benefit as long as it's used properly. Read what Ionized Water has done for me . And what you can expect from drinking Ionized Water .

Many articles have been written about Ionized Water. Dr. Hidemitsu Hayashi, a Heart Surgeon and Director of the Water Institute, Tokyo , Japan , wrote a 30 page article explaining Ionized Water in great detail . Dr. Hayashi describes Ionized Water in excruciating detail, including its precise chemistry during and after ionization. All this is completely ignored by the Quack Watcher who claims to be a chemist. When we don't understand the rudimentary principles of how something functions, some of us tend to simply dismiss it out of ignorance. This is certainly the case with the debunker of Ionized Water because anyone with even the rudimentary knowledge of its chemistry will see that Ionized Water is exactly what the body requires: higher pH, strong antioxidant, negative charge, abundance of electrons, incredible hydration and detoxification properties.

If the debunker truly wanted to know if Ionized Water actually did anything to the human body one way or another, he would need to consume some for a few days or a week, but I can assure he has not. Debunkers are notorious for never trying what they denounce. They are part of a faux-intelligentsia that believes that all science can be explained on paper and therefore there is never a reason to actually test anything in the field. This is the biggest mistake that any scientist can ever make and, by his own admission, the debunker of Ionized Water has never touched a drop of it nor used a water ionizer to draw the scientific conclusions he has made. As with many of the debunkers, closer examination of them and their methods reveals who they are and that they themselves should be debunked.

pH (potential for Hydrogen): (chemistry) p(otential of) H(ydrogen); the logarithm of the reciprocal of hydrogen-ion concentration in gram atoms per liter; provides a measure on a scale from 0 to 14 of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution (where 7 is neutral and greater than 7 is acidic and less than 7 is basic)

ORP (oxidation reduction potential): The potential for one liquid substance to reduce the oxidation of another substance as measured in millivolts (mV). 

More fat with that? Fast foods vary

Thursday, April 13th, 2006
fast-food

April 13, 2006

 BY LINDA A. JOHNSON

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Order fries or hot wings at a McDonald's or a KFC in the United States and you're more likely to get a super-sized helping of artery-clogging trans fats than you would be at their restaurants in some other countries.

A study of the fast-food chains' products around the world found remarkably wide variations in trans fat content from country to country, from city to city within the same nation, and from restaurant to restaurant in the same city.

The researchers said the differences had to do with the type of frying oil used, and the main culprit appeared to be partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in trans fats.

McDonald's Corp., which promised in September 2002 to cut trans fat in half, and KFC parent Yum! Brands Inc. said the explanation is local taste preferences. But nutrition experts and consumer activists said it is about money: Frying oil high in trans fats costs less.

The Danish researchers tested products from the chains' outlets in dozens of countries in 2004 and 2005, analyzing McDonald's chicken nuggets, KFC hot wings, and the two chains' french fries. The findings are reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

At a New York City McDonald's, a large fries-and-chicken-nuggets combo had 10.2 grams of the trans fat, compared with 0.33 grams in Denmark and about 3 grams in Spain, Russia and the Czech Republic.

At KFCs in Poland and Hungary , a large hot wings-and-fries order had 19 grams of trans fats or more, versus 5.5 grams for wings and fried potato wedges in New York . But in Germany , Russia , Denmark and Aberdeen , Scotland , the meal had less than a gram.

Harvard School of Public Health cardiologist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues wrote in the journal that although it may be hard for restaurants and food manufacturers to eliminate partially hydrogenated oil, other countries have replaced it with unsaturated fats without raising costs or reducing quality.

Doing so might prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes each year in the United States , they wrote.

Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil: Trans Fats

Cooking oil that has been injected with hydrogen to harden it and give it a longer shelf life are called trans fats. Switching to liquid vegetable oils such as canola, corn, olive or soy eliminates the trans fat.

Trans fat raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol. Eating just 5 grams of it per day increases the risk of heart disease 25%, research shows.

~ Associated Press