The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-10-10
Today, Kevin passes on the wisdom of a member of Bilderberg. Find out what is in store for 2010 and when the economic version of hurricane Katrina will hit America. Kevin also investigates how hard federal employees really work for your well-being and how much of your money is being thrown away.
The Near Extinction of Social Security
The Wages of Recession
Terrorists Now Required To Register
Airport Body Scan Radiation Risk
Nicotine Drugs Overhyped
Longer Needles Needed For Obese
Prescription Drugs are the New Crack Cocaine
Natural Health Remedies Removed From Canadian Shelves
GQ Has Jumped on The ‘Hazards of Cell Phones’ Wagon
Plus, professional astrologer and author, Sioux Rose, gives you her predictions for the world in 2010 and explains how the ‘Moon Dance’ affects your body and soul. Click here for more information on how to purchase her books and how to get your personal astrology reading today!
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Quitting Smoking Carries Diabetes Risk
January 06, 2010
Reuters
By Charles Dick
Smoking is well known as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, but scientists said on Monday that quitting the habit can raise the risk even more in the short term.
A study by U.S. researchers found that people who stop smoking have a 70 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first six years without cigarettes as compared to people who never smoked.
The researchers said they suspected the increased diabetes risk comes from extra weight gain common in people who quit.
But they said no one should use their findings as an excuse to continue smoking — a habit which can also cause lung disease, heart disease, strokes and many types of cancer.
“The message is: Don’t even start to smoke,” said Hsin-Chieh Yeh of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States, who led the study.
“If you smoke, give it up. That’s the right thing to do. But people have to also watch their weight,” she added.
Type 2 diabetes — often called adult-onset diabetes — is a common disease that interferes with the body’s ability to properly use sugar and insulin, a substance produced by the pancreas which normally lowers blood sugar after eating.
Overweight people and those with a family history of the disease have an increased risk of developing it, as do smokers.
Diabetes is reaching epidemic levels, with an estimated 180 million people suffering from it around the world.
Diabetes cases are forecast to triple in the United States in the next 25 years to 44 million with the costs of caring for them rising to $336 billion a year.
Yeh’s study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, looked at almost 11,000 middle-aged adults who did not yet have diabetes from 1987 to 1989. The patients were followed for up to 17 years and data about diabetes status, glucose levels, weight and more were collected at regular intervals.
The researchers found that people who quit smoking had a 70 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first six years after stopping compared to people who never smoked. The risks were highest in the first three years, and returned to normal after 10 years.
Among those who did not stop smoking the risk was lower, but the chance of developing diabetes was still 30 percent higher compared with those who never smoked.
Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world, killing more than 5 million people a year. A report by the World Lung Foundation last August said smoking could kill a billion people this century if trends hold.
Obesity Hurts Health More Than Smoking
January 06, 2010
Web MD
By Jennifer Warner
America’s obesity epidemic now poses an equal or greater threat to health-related quality of life than smoking, according to a new study.
Researchers say that as obesity in America has risen dramatically in recent years — and smoking rates have declined — the contribution of obesity to the burden of disease and shortening of life has increased while smoking’s role has decreased.
The study showed that from 1993 to 2008, the proportion of smokers among U.S. adults declined by 18.5% while the proportion of obese adults increased 85%.
Using information from nationwide annual health-related quality-of-life surveys conducted during the same time period, researchers calculated the Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) lost due to these two major health risk factors.
The results, published in the American Journal of Preventive Health, show that smoking-related QALYs lost remained relatively stable during this time period at 0.0438, or 16 days of healthy life lost per adult population.
Meanwhile, as the obesity epidemic increased the quality-of-life problems caused by obesity increased and accounted for 0.0464 QALYs lost.
Researchers say smoking had a bigger impact on deaths while obesity had a bigger effect on illness.
“Because of the marked increase in the proportion of obese people, obesity has become an equal, if not greater contributor to the burden of disease than smoking,” write researcher Haomiao Jia, PhD, of Columbia University, and colleagues. “Such data are essential in setting targets for reducing modifiable health risks and eliminating health disparities.”
Women Weighing Breast Cancer Screening Benefits/Risks
December 23, 2009
DailyMail.co.uk
By Nigel Hawkes
Here’s a little test. Breast cancer screening reduces deaths by 25 per cent. If we assume that 1,000 women dutifully turn up to all their screening appointments, how many lives will be saved?
Remarkably, the answer is one. Not 250, or 100, or even 25 - the figures picked by a substantial proportion of gynaecologists who were asked this question.
As a recent study showed, if 1,000 women began screening at the age of 50, and had a mammogram every year, only one would have her life saved through early detection and treatment of cancer by the time screening stops at the age of 70.
Without screening, four women would have died from breast cancer. With it, three would have done so.
But in the same group, between two and ten women would also be treated needlessly - possibly with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
And between 100 and 500 would have a false alarm, suffer worry, and need further tests before getting the all-clear. About half would undergo an unnecessary biopsy.
Here’s another example. The drug giant Pfizer claims, on the basis of a clinical trial, that its statin drug Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attacks in people with multiple risk factors - high blood pressure, high cholesterol or angina - by 36 per cent.
Assume 100 people take Lipitor for three-and-a-half years. How many heart attacks will be prevented?
The answer, once again, is one.
Without Lipitor, there would have been three heart attacks. With it, there were two.
More…
* Thousands of women still waiting months for breast cancer diagnosis despite Labour pledge
This is, indeed, close to the 36 per cent reduction claimed: Pfizer is not lying. But the bottom line is that 100 high-risk people had to take Lipitor for more than three years to prevent one of them having a heart attack. The other 99 got no benefit.
Benefits are easy to exaggerate when they are expressed in this way - and medicine is riddled with examples of inflated benefits and understated risks, misleading the unwell into unrealistic expectations and causing healthy people to worry needlessly.
The problem is called mismatched framing. Benefits are framed in one way; side-effects in another.
Expressing benefits as a relative risk - 25 per cent fewer breast cancer deaths, 36 per cent fewer heart attacks - produces a nice big number that looks impressive. But unless we know what the real underlying risk is, a percentage reduction is meaningless.
Let’s suppose that the risk to women of dangerous blood clots from a contraceptive pill is one in 7,000. A new pill is introduced and the risk doubles. Letters are sent to GPs across the country saying that the risks of the new pill are 100 per cent greater, and panic ensues.
Women give up the new pill in droves, abortions rise, and so does the risk of blood clots, since pregnancy carries a greater risk of thrombosis than the new pill.
This, of course, actually happened in 1995. If women had been told not that the risk had doubled, but it had increased by one in 7,000, would the same panic have occurred? Almost certainly not. One in 7,000 is an absolute risk increase; 100 per cent is a relative risk increase.
In medical journals, it is commonplace for benefits to be expressed in relative terms, while side-effects are given in absolute terms.
One recent study of the BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet found that a third of papers that included both benefits and harms failed to express them in the same metric.
The Academy of Medical Sciences has postponed a report on the issue until later in 2010.
In February, misleading leaflets urging women to get screened for breast cancer were withdrawn by the NHS because they failed to mention risks - false positives, invasive tests, misleading results, unnecessary operations and anxiety - and did not express benefits straightforwardly.
Public health specialists are in a bind over this. Their job is to get as many participants as possible screened, or vaccinated against flu, or whatever the latest wheeze is. So they focus on big numbers in order to make <em>not </em>participating seem like a dereliction of duty.
But what matters to the individual making a decision about whether to participate is not how it affects national statistics, but what it means to him or her.
The best way to express that is as a ‘number needed to treat’ (NNT) - that is, how many people have to take the treatment to save one event. In the case of the statin trial, the NNT would be 100. With breast cancer screening, it is 1,000.
So the chances that an individual will personally benefit are quite small: one in 100 for statins, one in 1,000 for mammography.
Some doctors argue that any treatment with an NNT of over 50 is no better than buying a lottery ticket. If women were told this, some would decide to get screened anyway. Others may prefer to opt out.
Screening is not worthless, but nor is it quite as wonderful as women have been led to believe.
Can public health doctors afford to be honest about risks and benefits? I wouldn’t bet on it. If drug companies, journals, public health campaigners and journalists are allowed to exaggerate without actually lying, who’s to stop them?
Meanwhile, the public struggle to understand what’s really best for them. Much greater transparency is needed, and fast.
Click here for the full report.
Holiday Snacks Contain Alarming Levels of Salt
December 11, 2009
Guardian
By Rebecca Smithers
Popular Christmas-themed food sold by supermarkets, coffee shops and fast food outlets can contain “shocking” amounts of salt which can pose serious health risks, a health group has warned.
A survey of of 87 products including turkey sandwiches, burgers, salads, pies, desserts and crisps from high street retailers’ festive ranges also found that consumers were often in the dark because of poor labelling and nutritional information.
Research by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) singled out the Christmas ‘full works sandwich’ on sale at popular sandwich chain Eat as the product with the highest level of salt overall. It contained a massive 4.2g salt per portion – over two-thirds of the daily maximum salt intake for adults.
The ‘festive menu’ on sale at McDonald’s consisting of a cheese and bacon burger with a side dish of cheese melt wedges and “festive dip” contains 6.1g of salt – more than the entire adult daily recommendation for an adult and over double that for a child. The wedges alone contain 2.8g salt per 100g making them saltier than seawater.
Even Eat’s supposedly healthy salads can contain high levels of salt. Its Christmas Box Christmas Lunch, which contains a pork pie, has 3g of salt per portion – the equivalent of six packets of crisps.
The lowest salt sandwiches on offer from coffee shops were the Starbucks turkey feast sandwich, Costa brie & cranberry panini and Caffe Nero cheddar and festive chutney sandwich – all containing 1.8g salt per portion. Sainsbury’s Christmas line features a smoked turkey and cranberry sandwich with just 1.05g salt per portion – a quarter of the Eat product.
Even desserts were surprisingly high in salt. A Costa Christmas chocolate cake has 0.94g salt per portion, for example – the equivalent of nearly two packets of crisps.
The recommended maximum intake for salt is 6g a day for adults and 3g for children aged four to six years but Cash said that even finding out how much salt is in the products was difficult because of poor labelling. The supermarkets were leading the way with more clear and comprehensive front of pack labelling, it said.
Katharine Jenner, nutritionist and Cash campaign manager, said: “Festive themed food is a lovely way of getting in the Christmas spirit. But this survey highlights how much salt could be hiding in your food without you even knowing it. The level of salt seen in some of the products is particularly shocking when you consider that many children may be eating these products. Regularly consuming a high-salt diet from a young age can put your health at risk. To offer new high-salt options on the menu when the nation is trying to reduce their salt intake is quite simply irresponsible.”
Professor Graham MacGregor of Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Cash chairman added: “Salt puts up our blood pressure, which is the major risk factor for strokes, heart failure and heart disease, the leading causes of death and disability in the UK. It is shocking to see so many new products so high in salt.”
In a statement, McDonald’s said its festive menu was an adult meal “positioned as an indulgent treat over the Christmas period”. It added: “We have worked very hard over recent years to make significant reductions in salt levels most of our permanent menu items – reducing salt in Chicken McNuggets by 30%, French Fries by 24% and ketchup by 23%.”
A spokeswoman for Costa said: “Everyone enjoys spoiling themselves a little over the festive period. At Costa we seek to provide our customers with a wide selection of food products to choose from and carry both healthy and indulgent products across our range all year round.”
Click here for the full report
Vioxx Risks Were Ignored by Merck
December 8, 2009
NaturalNews
by S.L. Baker
Pharmaceutical manufacturers would never knowingly withhold, gloss over or otherwise ignore evidence that any of their drugs could be killing people, right? Wrong. Take the case of Big Pharma giant Merck — the company kept a dangerous drug, Vioxx, on the market for years as tens of thousands died from taking the pain pill.
In a new study that should be a wake-up call to anyone who blindly trusts their health to the prescription drug industry, investigators concluded that Merck & Co. Inc., should have identified the deadly cardiovascular risks associated with taking Vioxx four years before the company finally pulled the drug from the market. In fact, Merck apparently stopped selling Vioxx only after the body count linked to the drugs kept piling up and the associated lawsuits became too numerous to ignore.
Merck introduced the drug in May of 1999 and Vioxx quickly became a commercial success, with sales climbing to $2 billion annually. However, it turns out Vioxx raised the risk of cardiovascular problems in users, most notably heart attacks and deaths, soon after a person started taking it. And even going off the drug didn’t help much — the risk of dropping dead from a heart attack stayed high for a year or more.
So how many deaths did Vioxx (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug known generically as rofecoxib) cause while still on the market? No one knows for sure but Dr. David Graham, a whistleblower who tried to alert the medical community to the dangers of the drug while Merck was still pushing it as a great pain-reliever, testified before the US Senate in 2002 and revealed data indicating 88,000 to 139,000 Americans experienced heart attacks as a side effect from the drug, and 30 to 40% of these died. So preventable deaths caused by Vioxx likely ranged from 27,000 to 55,000.
The evidence points to clear dangers of Vioxx
For the just released study, Joseph Ross, MD, MHS, assistant professor of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, led a team of six investigators who analyzed 30 randomized, placebo-controlled trials of Vioxx that were made available through lawsuits filed against Merck. The researchers published their findings in the November 23 edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
In all, the trials involving Vioxx enrolled 20,152 individuals and lasted from four weeks to four years. Research subjects who were given Vioxx took doses ranging from 12.5 milligrams to 50 milligrams. The Mount Sinai scientists analyzed the pooled data from these studies and found that safety concerns arose almost four years before Merck finally took the drug off the market.
Mammography Screenings Increase Risks of Breast Cancer
December 2, 2009
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
Ever since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force took a look, finally, at the scientific evidence and announced new recommendations earlier this month for routine mammograms — specifically that women under 50 should avoid them and women over 50 should only get them every other year — the reactions from many women, doctors and the mainstream media have reached the point of near hysteria. Not getting annual mammograms, some say, means countless women will receive a virtual death sentence because their breast tumors won’t be discovered. But what is rarely discussed about mammograms is this: the tests could actually be causing many cases of breast cancer.
In fact, a new study just presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), concludes the low-dose radiation from annual mammography screening significantly increases breast cancer risk in women with a genetic or familial predisposition to breast cancer. This is particularly worrisome because women who are at high risk for breast cancer are regularly pushed to start mammograms at a younger age — as early as 25 — and that means they are exposed to more radiation from mammography earlier and for more years than women who don’t have breast cancer in their family trees.
“For women at high risk for breast cancer, screening is very important, but a careful approach should be taken when considering mammography for screening young women, particularly under age 30,” Marijke C. Jansen-van der Weide, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Radiology at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, said in a statement to the media. “Further, repeated exposure to low-dose radiation should be avoided.”
Dr. Jansen-van der Weide and colleagues analyzed peer-reviewed, published medical research to investigate whether low-dose radiation exposure affects breast cancer risk among high-risk women. Out of the six studies included in this analysis, four looked at the effect of exposure to low-dose radiation among breast cancer gene mutation carriers. The other two studies traced the impact of radiation on women with a family history of breast cancer. The researchers took the combined data from all these research projects and then calculated odds ratios to estimate the risk of breast cancer caused by radiation.
The results? All the high-risk women in the study who were exposed to low-dose mammography type radiation had an increased risk of breast cancer that was 1.5 times greater than that of high-risk women who had not been exposed to low-dose radiation. What’s more, women at high risk for breast cancer who had been exposed to low-dose radiation before the age of 20 or who had five or more exposures to low-dose radiation were 2.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer than high-risk women not exposed to low-dose radiation.
Bottom line: any supposed benefit of early tumor detection using mammograms in young women with familial or genetic predisposition to breast cancer is offset by the potential risk of radiation-induced cancer. “Our findings suggest that low-dose radiation increases breast cancer risk among these young high-risk women, and a careful approach is warranted,” Dr. Jansen-van der Weide said in the press statement.
The mammogram scam exposed
Incredibly, although it is rarely reported in the mainstream media, the new study follows on the heels of several others that have already sounded the warning that mammograms may cause breast cancer. For example, NaturalNews covered a Johns Hopkins study published earlier this year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that warned radiation exposure from annual mammograms could trigger breast malignancies in women with a strong family history of breast and/or ovarian cancers who have altered genes.
Cancer Doctors Using Vitamin D for Treatment
December 2, 2009
Natural News
By E. Huff
Resounding evidence proving the effectiveness of vitamin D in slowing the onset of breast, colon, and other cancers is convincing a growing body of doctors and physicians to utilize the sunshine vitamin in their arsenal of cancer treatment weapons.
In the last several years, numerous epidemiological studies have illustrated the correlation between vitamin D deficiency and serious disease, including cancer. Researchers are now focusing attention on elevated levels of “therapeutic” vitamin D, far above the government’s daily recommended amounts, for use in disease treatment and prevention.
Oncologist Tracey O’Connor from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo has stated that she is now having all her patients supplement with vitamin D. Since vitamin D carries no risk unless taken at enormously high amounts above and beyond what any normal person would ingest, it can only benefit those who are already healthy by preventing disease, as well as those who are sick.
Recent studies have also shown that the general public is grossly deficient in vitamin D. Those with debilitating diseases have been found to be the most deficient, indicating a clear correlation between deficiency and the onset of disease. O’Connor pointed out that among women with breast cancer, about 80 percent of them are vitamin D-deficient.
Current research is suggesting that healthy doses of vitamin D require a several-thousand IU daily intake rather than the two- to six-hundred IU dose that has typically been recommended. While these lower levels may prevent rickets, they do little or nothing to prevent the development of many common ailments that have become prevalent in modern society.
Natural sunlight is the best way to obtain vitamin D throughout the warm months of the year. The precursor to vitamin D, ultraviolet light from the sun is absorbed into the skin where it is converted into this life-giving vitamin. The body knows when it has received enough for the day and shuts off production at the proper time, eliminating the risk of generating too much.
Processed Meat Increases Diabetes Risk
December 2, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
A report based on data from 12 pooled cohort studies on heavy meat diets was led by Dagfinn Aune from the University of Oslo and published in the journal Diabetologia. The study determined that the high intake of processed meat may increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 41 percent.
This new meta-analysis was conducted jointly from Norway and the US. The general conclusions of the study suggested that: “High intake of total meat increased the risk of diabetes by 17 percent, while red meat and processed meat were associated with 21 and 41 percent increases in diabetes risk.”
One of the primary purposes of this study was to resolve, ” . . . inconsistencies from previous studies which found both positive and negative associations between meat consumption and the risk of type 2 diabetes.”
Barry Popkin from the University of North Carolina described the study as “excellent’ and he went on to say that it “reiterates the concerns echoed in other major reviews and studies on the adverse effects of excessive meat intake”.
The higher rate of diabetes risk from processed meats can be attributed to the nitrates used as preservatives. Other studies have documented that nitrates cause beta cell toxicity. Beta cells are involved with the production of insulin. Consequently, their ability to produce insulin is blocked by nitrate induced toxicity.
Animal model studies proved that low doses of nitrosamine streptozotocin induced type 2 diabetes. Nitrosamines are formed by the nitrates interacting with amino acids in the stomach.
Earlier studies have documented negative health consequences with heavy meat eating. The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has warned that “. . . high intakes of red and processed meats may raise the risk of lung and colorectal cancer by up to 20 percent.” And the World Cancer Research Fund has reported a direct link to cancer with alcohol, red and processed meats. They also found that heavy red and processed meat eaters risked earlier death.
MRSA Bacteria Popping Up in American Hospitals
November 25, 2009
U.S. News
By Jennifer Thomas
Strains of antibiotic-resistant infections normally found in the community are increasingly showing up among hospital outpatients, raising the risk that inpatients could become infected, new research says.
From 1999 to 2006, researchers found a sevenfold increase in the incidence of outpatients with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections. Outpatients include people treated in emergency departments or surgical centers but not admitted, or at doctors’ offices associated with hospitals.
This poses a risk to inpatients because many resources are used by both sets of patients. These include surgical centers and the doctors themselves, who often treat patients both inside and outside of hospitals.
“What this is suggesting is that outpatients are a significant source of MRSA, especially community-associated MRSA strains,” said the study’s lead author, Eili Klein, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and a researcher at Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “This suggests the need for incentives to make sure hospitals are not only taking steps to prevent hospital-associated strains from spreading among inpatients, but preventing the spread of community-associated strains through shared resources.”
The study is published in the December issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.
MRSA, which burst into the public consciousness in the 1990s, is named for its resistance to methicillin and other antibiotics. There are several strains, including those that emerged in hospitals, called “hospital associated,” and those that emerged outside hospitals and tend to spread in schools and gyms, called “community associated.”
While both types can cause serious, life-threatening illness, hospital-acquired strains are generally more virulent. The bacteria can get into wounds, causing deadly blood or lung infections. About 20,000 people in the United States die each year from the MRSA infections, according to background information in the study.
Community-associated strains have also caused some deaths in otherwise healthy people, including several children who were killed by MRSA infections in the late 1990s. Typically, however, community-associated strains cause skin or other soft tissue infections that are treatable with newer antibiotics.
