Diet Soda Again Linked To Heart Attacks And Strokes – But Diet Coke Remains A Top Supporter Of Heart For Truth

February 8th, 2012

Natural News

By: Elizabeth Walling

Diet soft drinks are considered the “healthier” alternative to high fructose corn syrup and empty calories. But the truth is that diet drinks have an evil side: new research confirms that diet soda can seriously increase your risk for heart attack and stroke. But in spite of this – and many other studies that warn us of the harmful side effects of diet soda – Diet Coke remains a staunch supporter of the Heart for Truth Campaign.

In the latest study, researchers looked at 10 years of data from 2,564 individuals enrolled in the Northern Manhattan Study. The link between diet soda and serious health issues was undeniable:those who drank diet soda on a daily basis were 43 percent more likely to experience heart attacks, stroke or vascular death.

This may be the most recent study connecting diet soda to serious health problems, but it’s far from the first. Diet drinks have been linked in previous studies to diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome. Other studies confirm the link between diet soda and heart problems. Suffice it to say there is no lack of research to support the idea that diet soda is a hazard to our long-term health.

But Diet Coke tries to preserve its positive image with marketing strategies that emphasize its support for Heart for Truth, a campaign that aims to increase heart disease awareness. Cute heart graphics are plastered on billions of cans of Diet Coke, while celebrities like Heidi Klum and Minka Kelly give public support of Diet Coke’s campaign.

While Diet Coke makes a show of supporting heart disease awareness, it certainly isn’t going out of its way to make customers aware of the possible dangers that may await them at the bottom of every can of diet soda. It seems like Diet Coke wants to sweep the evidence right under the rug.

If Diet Coke officials were truly concerned with heart health, they would simply pull their product from the shelves and apologize for endangering the public’s health for the last several decades. But since that would seriously squelch profit margins, they’d prefer to alleviate their guilt by painting red hearts all over their cans instead.

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Bristol Palin is Paid $262,500 For Abstinence Campaign

April 7th, 2011

Los Angeles Times Blog

By: Emily Christianson

Bristol Palin took home $262,500 in 2009 for advocating against teen pregnancy, tax documents show. Apparently abstinence can be very lucrative.

The big bucks came from the Candie’s Foundation, a group aimed at shaping “the way youth in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.”

“We know that Ms. Palin’s work has had a positive effect on creating awareness about teen pregnancy,” Candie’s spokeswoman Ali Tyrangel said in a statement.

The reality show star, who made headlines as a teen mom in 2008 during her mother Sarah Palin’s run for vice president, even took her Candie’s campaign on her stint with “Dancing with the Stars.” Remember her awkward “pause before you play” sex talk with The Situation?

Critics are already taking shots at Palin, now 20, but some people are defending her, according to E! Online, saying, “The money she received was from multiple projects she did with them. She shot PSAs, print and Internet ads and did town hall meetings, as well, and the money she made was an accumulation of all of that. This is not out of the ordinary for a celebrity to make an income off of a charity they represent.”

Click here for the full report from Los Angeles Times Blog

Breast Cancer Awareness Campaigns Cause More Harm Than Good

October 15th, 2010

Natural News

By: Ethan A. Huff

For over 25 years, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) organization has been conducting campaigns to “promote breast cancer awareness, share information on the disease, and provide greater access to screening services.” But since such campaigns began, breast cancer mortality rates have remained virtually the same, while more women than ever needlessly undergo dangerous treatments for a disease they do not even have.

Groups like the American Cancer Society (ACS), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation all support breast cancer awareness initiatives, which include urging women to get annual mammograms and to undergo conventional treatments like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy at the first signs of a tumor. But many professors, scientists and health professionals now say that such programs and recommendations have not only failed to achieve positive results, but have actually put more women in harm’s way.

“I don’t think people understand the lack of progress (achieved by breast cancer awareness programs),” Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, is quoted as saying in a recent Los Angeles Times article. Visco referenced statistics showing that deaths from breast cancer have dropped maybe two percent since they started in 1990, which is likely a statistically insignificant figure.

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice explained that breast cancer awareness campaigns have failed to keep up with developments in breast cancer research, including new research showing that most of the cancers identified with mammography are not even malignant. And as a result of continued screening, millions of women end up being treated with expensive, potentially life-threatening treatments for cancers that will never harm them.

A recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that for every one woman helped by a mammogram, up to 15 others are misdiagnosed and mistreated. But because of breast cancer awareness campaigns that continue to scare women and push them towards outmoded, unscientific methods of approaching the disease, many women are willing to participate in conventional screening and treatment programs anyway, even if such programs ultimately cause them needless harm and possible death.

A drug company founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month
A quick look into the history of NBCAM reveals that its founding sponsor is AstraZeneca, a multi-national drug company that manufactures breast cancer drugs like Arimidex, Tamoxifen, Faslodex and Zoladex. And what was the original stated goal of NBCAM? To promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer.

Most NaturalNews readers already know that mammography is largely ineffective and dangerous to health. Mammograms do not differentiate between harmless and malignant tumors, and they pump a regular dose of radiation into women’s breasts that can eventually cause tumors to form. But the one thing mammograms are good at is racking up lots of breast cancer diagnoses.

Before the days of mammography, breast lumps were not the major scare they are today. But today, otherwise healthy women are habitually screened and told that detected tumor need immediate intervention, even though the vast majority of them are harmless. Sometimes women actually develop harmful tumors from the mammograms themselves, resulting in the same interventions. Either way, at the end of the day, drug companies like AstraZeneca reap large profits from the mammogram system.

“It’s a common problem with disease awareness campaigns and patient advocacy groups,” said Welch. “If you look into their funding sources, you’ll often find a pharmaceutical company or device maker who stands to benefit from an expansion in the number of people with the condition.”

Laurie Casaday, spokeswoman for NBCAM and senior manager of corporate affairs in oncology for AstraZeneca, denies such claims, however. She insists that the program is “not about selling a breast cancer drug”, but is instead about “making sure women are educated about their breast health.”

If the organization was really concerned about educating women about their breast health, though, it would acknowledge the mounting scientific evidence that denies the viability of mammography and conventional cancer treatments, and would subsequently stop using fear-mongering campaigns to persuade women to take that route. But this scenario will likely never happen because, in doing so, AstraZeneca and other drug companies would experience a tremendous drop in revenue due to significantly less false diagnoses.

Prevent breast cancer naturally
Real breast cancer awareness involves taking active steps to improve your health naturally, both nutritionally and environmentally. These include maintaining optimal vitamin D levels in your blood, avoiding exposure to toxins that cause cancer and eating plenty of cruciferous vegetables rich in anti-cancer nutrients.

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Cancer Patients Exploited By High-Profit Screening Scams

October 13th, 2010

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

Want to know the disturbing truth about the greed-driven cancer industry? I’ve written about it using blunt language here on NaturalNews, and awareness is spreading. People are sick of pinkwashing nonsense, and they’re wising up to the fundraising “run for the cure” scams that only funnel more money into corrupt, Pharma-dominated cancer non-profits.

Now a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association sheds new light on just how cruel and greedy the cancer industry really is. It turns out that even when cancer patients are terminal — meaning they’re expected to die soon — the cancer industry herds them into yet more screening, mammograms, biopsies and lab tests in order to generate more profits from Medicare before the patient expires.

It turns out they’re still irradiating women with mammograms even though these women already have “incurable” cancers! (Incurable by conventional medicine, that is.)

Even according to cancer industry doctors, patients who have less than 10 years left to live receive no benefit from cancer screening. So why are such patients being subjected to a barrage of cancer screening tests? Because the tests make more money for the cancer industry!

Hurry, make more money before they die!
It’s almost as if they’re saying, “Gee, these patients are about to expire, and we can’t bill Medicare if they’re already dead, so hurry up and run some tests before they die!”

Never mind the fact that such tests don’t help the patient at all. In fact, these tests can be invasive, painful and psychologically damaging. They put patients through hell in order to rake in some additional profits in the last few days, weeks or months before the cancer patient dies.

That’s the truth about how the cancer industry really operates. To them, people are just profit machines to be exploited.

This is now evidenced by the cancer industry’s own actions, by the way. It’s one thing to accuse the cancer industry of being driven by greed (which I’ve done on many occasions), but it’s another thing entirely for the industry to be caught red handed in a study published in JAMA and funded by the National Cancer Institute that documents this systematic abuse of patients.

Turning a human being into sick profits
The sad, sick truth of the matter is that both cancer screening and cancer treatments are profit centers for hospitals and cancer clinics. The more people they can screen, diagnose and treat with toxic chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, the more money they can collect off that person before they die.

A dying cancer patient is a cash cow to the cancer industry because doctors can try almost anything and say they’re holding out for “hope” that something might work. It’s called “heroic medicine” but there are no heroes, really. Just cowards in the form of the cancer doctors exploiting patients for profit. Many conventional doctors have come to realize that a terminal cancer patient is like a blank check that they can cash in for huge financial gains.

I knew a cancer patient described as terminal by the doctors who was offered an “experimental” cancer drug which would involve a series of weekly injections. The only catch? The bill was $14,000 a month and you have to pay out of pocket since no insurance would cover it.

Drug companies and cancer doctors pressure cancer patients to try these useless “experimental” therapies not as a way to actually cure their cancers but as a way to extract their entire life savings before they die.

No one has ever been cured by chemotherapy
The conventional cancer industry, you see, has cured no one. There isn’t a single person who has ever been cured by chemotherapy because chemotherapy does not cure cancer, it only poisons the body. In fact, cancer doctors practicing today will tell you straight up that “there are no cures for cancer” which is they are “looking for the cure” by selling pink products and taking your donation money.

The cancer industry, you see, has a zero percent success rate at curing cancer. Think about it: After billions of dollars, three decades of research, and millions of cancer victims dead from chemotherapy and radiation, the cancer industry has not produced even a single success story of someone who was CURED of cancer. Not a single one!

How’s that for a failed approach to cancer? And they claim that if they only had a few billion more dollars, then they would be able to find the cure. Do you smell something fishy with that?

Meanwhile, in the world of natural medicine, people are cured of cancer every day. Well, technically they are not cured from the outside but rather are healed from the inside so that their cancer disappears and they regain full immune system health. It’s so common in the world of natural health that the really good cancer doctors don’t even consider cancer to be much of a challenge. I know of one cancer doctor who produces cancer cures every week at his clinic in Florida. But he has one rule: He will not see patients who have poisoned their bodies with chemotherapy. “They’re too far gone and cannot heal themselves,” he explains.

No wonder the conventional industry has zero success stories of people cured of cancer. Now, sure, they have some “remission” stories of people who temporarily “conquered” cancer, but guess what? Cancer always comes back in those people! And why? Because their body’s defenses have now been poisoned by chemotherapy, making them even more vulnerable to tumor growth.

Cancer patients come and go, you see, but the cancer industry keeps churning along, trading bodies for dollars, causing unimaginable human suffering just so it can keep itself alive with an infusion of new daily profits. Now, even the peer-reviewed medical journals are starting to see the ugly truth of just how profit-driven this industry really is.

I am confident that one day this present era of medicine will be characterized as a “Dark Ages” of medicine, driven by egos, profits and greed. Chemotherapy will be seen as utterly senseless, and radiation therapy as barbaric. Future generations will look back upon the pinkwashing, the “Run for the Cure” fundraising and the free mammogram drives and just shake their heads in disbelief, wondering, “How could they have all been so stupid?”

The answer to that is complex, of course. Some people aren’t stupid. They’re the ones reading NaturalNews and taking charge of their health to prevent cancer in the first place. There are lots of smart, informed people around who don’t buy into the cancer industry’s ridiculous propaganda and disease fear mongering. It’s the masses, however, that fall for the cancer industry quackery that has now become so routine that almost no one questions it.

And in understanding their stupidity, you have to remember that they’ve all been dosed with fluoride in the drinking water and injected with brain-harming seasonal flu vaccines. They’re also living on chemically-altered, genetically modified processed junk food. Thus, they probably don’t have their full mental faculties up and running, and it’s difficult for them to think clearly enough to resist cancer industry propaganda.

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Doctors Finally Testing Patients For Vitamin D Deficiency

September 3rd, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

Growing awareness about the prevalence and risks of vitamin D deficiency is leading more and more doctors to test their patients’ blood levels of the vitamin.

“Upwards of 70 percent of American adults are vitamin D deficient or insufficient,” said cardiologist James O’Keefe of St. Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute. “In the last year, awareness of vitamin D deficiency has really exploded.”

Vitamin D is more properly classified as a hormone, and it helps regulate gene function in various parts of the body. It is naturally synthesized in the skin upon exposure to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, but sedentism and growing use of sunblock have worsened deficiency rates in recent decades.

According to O’Keefe, vitamin D testing has become the most popular “a la carte” blood test ordered by doctors in the past year. The test costs about $100, and is covered by some insurance providers.

Vitamin D is known to play a role in bone health and immune function, but many doctors are now fingering deficiency for a number of more general complaints. Carla Aamodt, another doctor at St. Luke’s, notes that when she orders supplementation for patients with vitamin D levels below 10 nanograms per milliliter, the patients feel better overall, have more energy with less muscle aches and pains.”

The jury is still out on optimal vitamin D levels, but researchers agree that they fall somewhere between 30 and 40 nanograms per milliliter.

Billie Howard Barnes of Kansas City suffered from chronic pain until her doctor ordered a vitamin D test and discovered that her blood levels were a paltry 5 nanograms per milliliter.

“I’m 43, and getting up in the morning, my feet would hit the floor and every joint in my body was sore,” Barnes said. “I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. It just kind of crept up on me.”

After taking a high-dose supplement for a few weeks, Barnes began to recover.

“It wasn’t an instant thing, but I just feel much better,” she said. “I’m not as stiff. Colleagues say there’s more pep in my step.”

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Americans Fail at Diabetes Awareness

November 2, 2009

Atlanta Journal Constitution

By HealthDay News

Though someone is diagnosed with diabetes every 20 seconds, many Americans lack basic knowledge about the potentially life-threatening disease, according to a new survey from the American Diabetes Association.

Diabetes is responsible for more deaths each year in the United States than breast cancer and AIDS combined, but just 42 percent of those surveyed knew that diabetes could be so deadly.

“There’s a real lack of awareness of the seriousness of the disease,” said Sue McLaughlin, president of Health Care and Education for the diabetes association. To combat that, the organization has launched a new campaign called Stop Diabetes to encourage people with diabetes to share their stories. The effort aims to increase awareness of the disease, fight the social stigma sometimes associated with it and get more people involved in the fight against diabetes.

Those who have the disease often say the lack of awareness can feel like a lack of support.

“Living with diabetes every day is a struggle, and people don’t always understand what you go through every day,” said Malika Bey of Pittsburgh. Bey was diagnosed with gestational diabetes during two pregnancies, and then with type 2 diabetes after her last pregnancy.

“It would help if family members were more supportive,” she said. “You know, I can’t eat everything I want to eat, and at a party, nobody thinks about something simple, like getting diet drinks.”

McLaughlin said a common myth is that sugar and overeating cause diabetes. But, that’s not true for either type of diabetes. Diet isn’t a factor at all in type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the body mistakenly attacks the islet cells in the pancreas, destroying the body’s ability to produce insulin. And, though type 2 diabetes is more common in people who are overweight, genetics and other unknown factors — not just diet — can be contributors. Even some thin people have type 2 diabetes.

Still, only one-third of the people surveyed knew that too much sugar did not cause diabetes. And more than half of the respondents wrongly believed that anyone who was overweight or obese would eventually develop type 2 diabetes.

But the opposite belief — that you won’t get diabetes even though you’re overweight — can be a problem, too, experts say.

Frank Timmons, from Rockland, Mass., tipped the scales at 347 pounds. When he went to the doctor in November 2008, his blood sugar level was 350 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). A normal random blood sugar reading should be less than 140 mg/dL.

“I was kind of a train wreck,” Timmons admitted in a statement released by the American Diabetes Association. But, he used his diagnosis to kick-start a new life. Just a year later, Timmons has lost 140 pounds and his blood sugar levels are back in the normal range. He said the biggest factor in his success is exercise: He walks at a brisk pace for 45 minutes each day.

“You have to make up your mind to be well,” Timmons said. “It is hard to do. Once you dedicate yourself to it, you will be amazed at your success.”

The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, included 2,081 men and women from across the United States. Their average age was 46, and 285 of them had been diagnosed with diabetes.

The survey also found that:

Just 12 percent knew that people with diabetes don’t have to follow a more restrictive diet than the healthy diet that’s recommended for the general population.

Almost one in 10 respondents thought there was a cure for diabetes, and 19 percent weren’t sure. (Although there are ways to manage diabetes, there is no cure.)

Less than 60 percent could correctly distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Almost 20 percent erroneously believed that the death rate from diabetes was declining.

Overall, Americans scored a 51 percent on the survey — a failing grade.

“This is a serious disease, and something that causes a lot of deaths,” McLaughlin said. “We hope the Stop Diabetes campaign will raise awareness about how important it is to be educated about diabetes and to get screened if you’re at high risk.”

Those in the high-risk category include people who are older than 45, are of a race other than white or have a family history of the disease. Being physically inactive or overweight are also risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

Symptoms of diabetes include increased thirst, increased urination, blurred vision, tingling in the hands and feet, fatigue, dry skin and, possibly, increased hunger, McLaughlin said.

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Chemotherapy Treatment of Children Multiplies Risk of Cancer Later in Life

August 24, 2009

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Adults who underwent chemotherapy as children are at a significantly higher risk of developing cancer as adults, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, Denmark, and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers examined the medical histories of 47,679 people from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden who had been diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20 between the years of 1943 and 2005. They found that those diagnosed with a childhood cancer ran three times the risk of developing cancer in adulthood as an adult of the same generation who had not had cancer as a child. This elevated risk held strong even into old age.

The generation most likely to develop second cancers was that diagnosed between 1975 and 2005, followed by those diagnosed between 1960 and 1975 or those diagnosed before 1970. Because the doses used in radiation treatment have steadily decreased over the years, while chemotherapy treatment has become steadily more aggressive, the researchers concluded that childhood chemotherapy is the most likely culprit for the increased risk of adult cancers.

“What we need now is two-fold: new treatment ideas to decrease the risk of later effects, and much better surveillance of childhood cancer survivors during adulthood,” lead researcher Jorgen Olsen said. “Cancer treatments don’t just increase the risk of other cancers, but can lead to all sorts of other problems — from cardiovascular to reproductive.”

Pediatric oncologist James Nicholson of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge agreed that survivors of childhood cancers need to be carefully monitored for new cancers throughout their lifetimes.

“A study like this does raise awareness of the problem,” he said. “If it means alarm bells ring earlier when there are symptoms in people who were treated for cancer as a child that would be a very good thing.”

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