GQ Has Jumped on The ‘Hazards of Cell Phones’ Wagon

February 5, 2010

GQ

By Christopher Kethcham

EARLIER THIS WINTER, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”

It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might be killing us.

Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance, the following headlines that have appeared in highly reputable international newspapers and journals over the past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg Morgenpost: ARE WE TELEPHONING OURSELVES TO DEATH? That fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: MOBILE PHONES AFFECT THE BRAIN’S METABOLISM. December 2007, from Agence France-Presse: ISRAELI STUDY SAYS REGULAR MOBILE USE INCREASES TUMOUR RISK. January 2008, in London’s Independent: MOBILE PHONE RADIATION WRECKS YOUR SLEEP. September 2008, in Australia’s The Age: SCIENTISTS WARN OF MOBILE PHONE CANCER RISK.

Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alz heimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”

Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.

As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an investigative newsletter called Microwave News. “No one in this country cared!” Slesin said of the findings. “It wasn’t news!” He suggested that much of the comfort of our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. “We love our cell phones. The paradigm that there’s no danger here is part of a worldview that had to be put into place,” he said. “Americans are not asking the questions, maybe because they don’t want the answers. So what will it take?”

TO UNDERSTAND HOW radiation from cell phones and wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised here, it’s necessary to go back fifty years, long before the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young neuroscientist named Allan Frey.

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10 Foods You Should NEVER Eat!

People email me every day about what foods to eat and not to eat. As a loyal listener of the show, you get my personal recommendations such as Grass Fed Beef, but I wanted to give you a more general list…

10 Foods You Should NEVER Eat!

1. Microwaved Food
2. Excitotoxins (MSG – monosodium glutamate, aspartame) and anything you can’t pronounce
3. Homogenized and non-organic dairy products
4. Any product that contains hydrogenated oil
5. Anything you can’t pronounce do not put on your skin (propylene glycol / mineral oil)
6. Non-filtered water for drinking, showering, bathing and swimming
7. Pork and shellfish
8. White sugar and white flour
9. Any meat that’s not totally organic, range free, grass fed, and properly killed
10. “Fat Free”, “Sugar Free” anything

-KT

Ridiculous Story of the Week: ‘Microwaves Help Shrink Breast Cancer Tumours’

January 18, 2010

Visit Bulgaria

By Anna Tomova

Reporting a new advancement in late stage breast cancer treatment, Dr. William Dooley, Director, Surgical Oncology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Centre reports, a recent study reveals microwave heating of breast tissue, not only helps shrinks tumours, but also makes chemotherapy more effective.

Earlier, the only treatment for late stage breast cancer was mastectomy, however, women now have a better chance of surviving breast cancer and do not have to have their breasts removes, as figures from the initial study indicate, this new technology may reduce the need for a mastectomy by 90%.

It is not known yet, why the cancer cells are so sensitive to microwave generated heat, and Dr. Dooley is of the opinion that this treatment will not work on other cancer types.

Researchers have for long been trying to find a treatment for breast cancer that does not involve mastectomy, as body image and self confidence are important in helping a patient heal fully, after going through with this horrible ordeal.

Already, researchers have begun to plan the next phase of clinical trials this year for testing the therapy on even larger tumours.

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Toxic Chemical Still Found in Popcorn

December 11, 2009

Sphere

By Andrew Schneider

Two years ago, Orville Redenbacher soared from the graveyard and announced in weeks of TV ads that his popcorn was now free of diacetyl. That’s the chemical in artificial butter flavoring that has been blamed for sickening hundreds of workers, killing a handful and destroying the lungs of at least three microwave popcorn addicts.

Almost every other popcorn maker followed suit.

But now, government health investigators are reporting that the “new, safer, butter substitutes” used in popcorn and others foods are, in some cases, at least as toxic as what they replaced.

Even the top lawyer for the flavoring industry said his organization has told anyone who would listen that diacetyl substitutes are actually just another form of diacetyl.

So what is the Obama administration going to do about it? Nothing meaningful, at least for a year, it said this week, stunning unions, members of Congress, public health activists and physicians who have pleaded for government action to protect workers and consumers from the butter flavoring.

“We’ve been very clear to flavor manufacturers, food companies and regulators that these so-called substitutes are diacetyl,” said John Hallagan, general counsel for the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.

When diacetyl trimmer is in the presence of heat and water, it will release diacetyl. And butter starter distillate is not a substitute for diacetyl because it contains high concentrations of diacetyl. However, it is considered a natural material, which is a boon to companies that wish market their food items with the “natural” label, Hallagan said in an interview from Colorado.

Hallagan said that his trade association discouraged using these materials and calling their products “diacetyl-free.”

But he added that his group “is not a regulator and has no legal authority to prohibit their use. That’s up to the food manufacturers.”

Those companies, citing competition, repeatedly refuse to discuss what they’re using today to add the butter flavor to what they sell.

But, at their professional conferences, food scientists and flavorists openly discuss that they are using blends called starter distillates and trimmers as substitutes for the rich butter flavors that consumers love so much.

Government health investigators already have concluded that these butter surrogates may be unsafe.

“The inclusion of these alternative substances neither eliminate diacetyl nor (ensure) safety for workers,” physicians from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — Drs. Kathleen Kreiss and Nancy Sahakian — wrote this year.

Monday, Dr. Daniel Morgan, with the Respiratory Toxicology Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said he found the same danger in one of the principle components of the butter substitute, a concoction called 2,3-pentanedione.

“It caused the same injuries in test animals as diacetyl, and our preliminary data indicates the toxicity is close to identical,” Morgan said in a phone interview from his laboratory in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

“We don’t really know what industry is using as a substitute in these ‘diacetyl-free’ items. But if 2,3-pentanedione was being used, it’s being done without toxicity data.”

The disease from exposure to diacetyl — bronchiolitis obliterans — is debilitating and potentially fatal. It irreversibly destroys the small airways in the lung. The only hope for many is a hard-to-get single or double lung transplant.

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You don’t have to have money to eat & live right…

Kevin,

I read your Natural Cures book around four years ago and after reading just a little, it changed my life. I went into my kitchen and threw out everything, including my food, pots, and microwave. I then went to various health stores to purchase pure water to drink and bathe in until I was able to purchase a water filter. I also purchased organic fruits and vegetables. After a week of this, I felt great and wanted to smoke no more!! Four years later, I feel better by the day and am still learning more and more!

I just want people to know you don’t have to have money to eat and live right. I am poor and in debt due to child support, but am rich in health and spirit and am a living example to my children.

Thank you, Kevin!
Michael Conti