The Kevin Trudeau Show: 3-2-10
Today, Kevin explains how corporations are scamming you and exposes the real person behind that politician. Plus, find out why someone would take a drug that has a common side effect of cancer.
More Proof of Government Corruption
FDA’s Approval of Aspartame under Scrutiny
Obama Yet to Kick Smoking Habit
Stop Smoking Now!
They Will Not Control Us
Plus, author & fitness guru, Jennifer Nicole Lee, stopped by to explain how the Law of Attraction helped her get the perfect body. Click here to purchase her new book, The Mind, Body & Soul Diet.
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HRT and Asthma Linked
February 12, 2010
Guardian
By BMJ Group
Taking oestrogen-only HRT might increase women’s short-term risk of developing asthma for the first time, especially for women with allergies, according to a big new study from France.
What do we know already?
Previous studies have suggested that the hormone oestrogen plays a part in making women susceptible to asthma. Although we tend to think of asthma as a disease that starts in childhood, quite a lot of people first get asthma as an adult.
Asthma is more common in girls once they’ve started their periods, and it tends to become less common after women go through the menopause.
However, asthma has become more common in all age groups in recent years. So, doctors are interested to know whether hormonal treatments – like the contraceptive pill and HRT– have an effect.
The new study looked at a group of more than 57,000 French women who were around menopausal age, none of whom had been diagnosed with asthma at the start of the study. Researchers followed the women for an average 10 years, recording what medicines they took during that time and whether they were diagnosed with asthma.
What does the new study say?
Women who took oestrogen-only HRT were more likely to get asthma during the study. Women who took combined HRT, which includes oestrogen plus another hormone called progestogen, didn’t have an increased risk.
During the study, tabout one woman in 1,000 was diagnosed with asthma each year. Of these women, 56 percent had taken HRT within the past two years, and 36 percent had never taken HRT. When the researchers looked at all the factors affecting the women’s health, they found women who’d taken oestrogen-only HRT had about a 67 percent increased risk of getting asthma, compared with women who never used HRT.
Looking at other factors, the researchers said that having had an allergic disease before (for example, hay fever or eczema) increased the risk when combined with HRT. Never having smoked also increased the risk when combined with HRT, but this could be because it was hard to untangle the increased risk of asthma from smoking, from the effects of HRT.
The increased risk from HRT seemed to wear off a couple of years after women had stopped taking it.
How reliable are the findings?
This is a big, well-conducted study with interesting results. However, this type of study can never prove that one thing (HRT) caused another (asthma). It can only show that there’s an association, which might have been caused by something else. For example, women taking long-term medication like HRT need to visit their GP for prescriptions, so might be more likely to mention problems with their breathing and be diagnosed with asthma. We can’t be sure that HRT itself caused the asthma.
Where does the study come from?
The study was done by researchers from France and Mexico. It was published in Thorax, a medical journal that is part of the BMJ Group. It was funded by grants from three French research institutions.
What does this mean for me?
If you’re considering taking HRT for menopausal symptoms, there are a lot of pros and cons to take on board. HRT has previously been linked to a slightly increased risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, and blood clots. This is one more factor to take account of when deciding whether to take HRT to relieve the symptoms of menopause.
What should I do now?
If you have concerns about the medicine you are taking, make an appointment to speak to your GP.
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Low Intelligence Among Top Heart Health Risks
February 10th, 2010
Reuters UK
By Kate Kelland
Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work.
Research by Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.
Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women Europe, the United States and most industrialised countries.
According to the World Health Organisation, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes accounted for 32 percent of all deaths around the world in 2005.
It is well known that people with poorer education and lower incomes often face higher risks of ill health and a range of diseases. Studies have pointed to many likely reasons, including limited access to healthcare and other resources, poorer living conditions, chronic stress and higher rates of lifestyle risk factors like smoking.
The MRC study, which analysed data from 1,145 men and women aged around 55 and followed up for 20 years, rated the top five heart disease risk factors as cigarette smoking, IQ, low income, high blood pressure, and low physical activity.
The researchers, led by David Batty of the MRC and Social and Public Health Science Unit in Glasgow, Scotland, said there were “a number of plausible mechanisms” which might explain why lower IQ scores could raise the risk of heart disease — in particular a person’s approach to “healthy behaviour.”
Those who ignored or failed to understand advice about the risks of smoking or benefits of good diet and exercise for heart health would be more likely to be at higher risk, they wrote in a study in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention.
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Scientists Say Nicotine Drugs Overhyped
February 9th, 2010
All Headline News
By David Goodhue
Australian researchers say most people successfully quit smoking without the use of nicotine-replacement products and drugs, and quitting “cold turkey” or by reducing-then-quitting, should be promoted more.
Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, said in a statement that emphasis on products like nicotine gum, patches and lozenge have led to the “medicalisation” of smoking cessation, even though they say most smokers stay quit without using them.
The researchers say they reviewed 511 studies about people quitting published in 2007 and 2008. Chapman and MacKenzie said the studies showed two-thirds to three-quarters of smokers said they kicked the habit unassisted and most smokers said staying off the smokes was less difficult than expected.
Chapman and MacKenzie said the push for nicotine replacement products is due largely to pharmaceutical companies funding many smoking cessation studies.
The report is published in the Public Library of Science journal Medicine.
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Scientists Claim You Really Can be Bored to Death
February 8, 2010
Mail Online
By Jonathan Petre
Boredom could be shaving years off your life, scientists have found.
Researchers say that people who complain of boredom are more likely to die young, and that those who experienced ‘high levels’ of tedium are more than two-and-a-half times as likely to die from heart disease or stroke than those satisfied with their lot.
More than 7,000 civil servants were studied over 25 years – and those who said they were bored were nearly 40 per cent more likely to have died by the end of study than those who did not.
The scientists said this could be a result of those unhappy with their lives turning to such unhealthy habits as smoking or drinking, which would cut their life expectancy.
Specialists from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, looked at data from 7,524 civil servants aged between 35 and 55 who were interviewed between 1985 and 1988 about their levels of boredom. They then found out whether they had died by April last year.
Researcher Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology this week, said: ‘The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom.
‘It is important that people who have dull jobs find outside interests to keep boredom at bay, rather than turn to drinking or smoking.’
Psychologist Graham Price added: ‘It is important to distinguish between cause and effect. Are these people turning to drink and drugs because they are bored or because they have certain characteristics?
‘For many people who are unmotivated or uninspired by life, or maybe have a tendency towards depression, the way out of it is to change their focus away from themselves and on to other people.
‘From being all me, me, me, they should be thinking, what can I do for my family, my friends, my colleagues, even my boss.’
The original survey found that one in ten civil servants had been bored within the past month, with women more than twice as likely than men to suffer. Younger employees and those with more menial jobs were also found to be more prone to boredom.
Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study.
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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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Vitamin D Fights Bowel Cancer
January 22nd, 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, those with the highest levels of the vitamin were at 40 per cent lower risk of developing the disease compared with those with the lowest levels.
Scientists looked at vitamin D quantities in 1,248 people with bowel cancer and 1,248 controls in the largest ever study of the subject.
The research was carried out by scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, and Imperial College London, and was funded by World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF).
It comes after medical experts expressed concern yesterday about the rising number of cases of rickets – caused by vitamin D deficiency – and called for it to be added to milk and other food products.
The main source of vitamin D is sunlight, through skin exposure, but it is also present in a small number of foods, such as oily fish or cod liver oil.
According to the research team, although the latest study provides evidence of a link between vitamin D and bowel cancer it does not prove that taking vitamin D supplements prevents the disease.
More studies are needed to find out the potential impact on other cancers and the effects of taking extra vitamin D doses, scientists said.
Dr Panagiota Mitrou, science programme manager for WCRF, said: ”This is the biggest ever study on this subject and there is now quite a lot of evidence from studying populations that people who have low levels of vitamin D are more likely to develop bowel cancer.
”The next step is to carry out new clinical trials to try to confirm whether vitamin D supplementation can reduce the risk of bowel cancer and whether there are any harmful effects of higher levels of vitamin D.
”Looking at the figures in this latest study, it suggests that increasing the UK’s vitamin D intake by 10% could prevent 7% of cases.
”And when you think that there are about 37,500 cases diagnosed in the UK every year, that could have a big impact.
”But we need to emphasise that, for the moment, the findings need to be treated with caution and they are certainly not enough evidence to suggest that we should be taking supplements to increase levels of vitamin D.
”The best advice for reducing risk of bowel cancer remains to stop smoking, maintain a healthy weight, be regularly physically active, to eat more fibre and less red and processed meats and to cut down on alcohol.”
Dr Mazda Jenab, the lead author of the study from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, said: ”Our results support a role for vitamin D in the etiology of colorectal cancer, but this has to be balanced with caution regarding the potential toxic effects of too much vitamin D and the fact that very little is known about the association of vitamin D with either increased or reduced risk of other cancers.”
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Benefits of Green Tea block Cancer
January 15, 2010
BBC News
The latest work in more than 500 people adds to growing evidence suggesting the beverage has anti-cancer powers.
In the study, smokers and non-smokers who drank at least a cup a day cut their lung cancer risk significantly, a US cancer research conference heard.
The protection was greatest for people carrying certain genes.
But cancer experts said the findings did not change the fact that smoking is bad for health.
Daily cuppa
Green tea is made from the dried leaves of the Asian plant Camellia sinesis and is drunk widely across Asia.
The rates of many cancers are much lower in Asia than other parts of the world, which has led some to link the two.
Laboratory studies have shown that extracts from green tea, called polyphenols, can stop cancer cells from growing.
But results from human studies have been mixed. Some have shown a protective effect while others have failed to find any evidence of protection.
In July 2009, the Oxford-based research group Cochrane published a review of 51 studies on green tea and cancer which included over 1.5 million people.
They concluded that while green tea is safe to drink in moderation, the research so far is conflicting about whether or not it can prevent certain cancers.
Reduced risk
Dr I-Hsin Lin, of Shan Medical University, found that among smokers and non-smokers, people who did not drink green tea were more than five times as likely to get lung cancer than those who drank at least one cup of green tea a day.
Among smokers, those who did not drink green tea at all were more than 12 times as likely to develop lung cancer than those who drank at least a cup a day.
Researchers then analysed the DNA of people in the study and found certain genes appeared to play a role in the risk reduction.
Green tea drinkers, whether smokers or non smokers, with certain types of a gene called IGF1, were far less likely to develop lung cancer than other green tea drinkers with different types of this gene.
Yinka Ebo, of Cancer Research UK, said the findings should not be used as an excuse to keep smoking.
“Smoking tobacco fills your lungs with around 80 cancer-causing chemicals. Drinking green tea is not going to compensate for that.
“Unfortunately, it’s not possible to make up for the harm caused by smoking by doing other things right like eating a healthy, balanced diet.
“The best thing a smoker can do to reduce their risk of lung cancer, and more than a dozen other cancer types, is to quit.”
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New Study Says Kids Are Good For Your Health
January 15, 2010
USA Today
By Sharon Jayson
Being a parent can be stressful, but new research calls into question some long-held beliefs about physical and psychological effects of having kids.
A study published today in Annals of Behavioral Medicine finds that parents have better blood pressure readings than childless adults.
“Women were driving the effect,” says co-author Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “Women with children had the lowest blood pressure, and women without had the highest” of those studied.
Holt-Lunstad, along with researchers from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and California State University-Long Beach, monitored the blood pressure of 198 adults ages 20-68. Participants wore portable monitors, which took random readings three times an hour, multiple times a day, over 24 hours, including while they slept.
The researchers considered other factors that influence blood pressure, such as age, body mass, gender, exercise, employment and smoking. They controlled for length of marriage and duration of marriage before kids. Researchers compared parents with kids under age 2 to parents with teens to parents with kids over 18 and found no differences.
Thomas Kamarck, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who has researched nighttime blood pressure, says he’s not sure about the link to parenthood.
He hasn’t yet seen the new study, but he says that “the fact that there’s no difference between young children and adult children” suggests that blood pressure readings reflect “something about the people who choose to be parents, rather than the day-to-day experience of being a parent” that may account for the findings.
Holt-Lunstad says researchers need to study parents and other adults over time to see whether parenthood actually does reduce blood pressure.
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One-Third of American Adults Are Obese, but Rate Slows
January 14, 2010
New York Times
By Pam Belluck
Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday.
The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among men and for closer to 10 years among women and children — long enough for experts to say the percentage of very overweight people has leveled off.
But the percentages have topped out at very high numbers. Nearly 34 percent of adults are obese, more than double the percentage 30 years ago. The share of obese children tripled during that time, to 17 percent.
“Right now we’ve halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” said Dr. William H. Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the disease control centers. “The data are really promising.
“That said, I don’t think we have in place the kind of policy or environmental changes needed to reverse this epidemic just yet.”
Dr. Dietz said the data probably reflected increased awareness of the obesity problem, especially among women, “who buy food, prepare it and see it, and they’re making changes for themselves that they’re also making for their kids.” He also cited a reduction in “less healthful foods” at school.
Some experts, though, were not optimistic that the leveling off was a result of improved eating and exercise habits.
“Until we see rates improving, not just staying the same, we can’t have any confidence that our lifestyle has improved,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Dr. Ludwig said the plateau might just suggest that “we’ve reached a biological limit” to how obese people could get. When people eat more, he said, at first they gain weight; then a growing share of the calories go “into maintaining and moving around that excess tissue,” he continued, so that “a population doesn’t keep getting heavier and heavier indefinitely.”
Furthermore, Dr. Ludwig said, “it could be that most of the people who are genetically susceptible, or susceptible for psychological or behavioral reasons, have already become obese.”
The numbers, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on national surveys that record heights and weights of a representative sample of Americans. People are considered obese if their body mass index — a ratio of height to weight — is 30 or greater. Someone five and a half feet tall is obese at 186 pounds; a six-foot person is obese at 221 pounds.
Even though the data show an overall plateau for obesity rates, they indicate an increase from 1999 to 2008 in the heaviest boys, ages 6 to 19, primarily whites. Experts speculated that heavy children in environments of unhealthy food and physical inactivity might simply be shifting into the top weight categories because their situation had not improved.
African-American adults have the highest obesity rates — 37 percent among men and nearly 50 percent among women. For Hispanic women, the rate is 43 percent. Hispanic and black children have higher rates than non-Hispanic whites.
Federal health officials had set a goal a decade ago that no more than 15 percent of people would be obese in 2010.
“We aren’t near that, and we haven’t moved in that direction,” said Cynthia L. Ogden, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics and an author of the reports.
In addition, 68 percent of adults and nearly one-third of children are considered at least overweight, with a body mass index of 25 or higher. For a 5-foot-8 person, that would be 164 pounds.
Dr. Dietz said he hoped the obesity data would follow what happened with smoking rates, which leveled off before declining. But he said obesity was difficult to address because while “tobacco is a single source, obesity is both physical activity and diet.”
Experts like Steven Gortmaker, a Harvard public health professor, said obesity would decline only with new policies, like penalties and incentives to promote healthier foods and exercise.
“If you look at the reversal of the smoking epidemic,” Dr. Gortmaker said, “substantial change didn’t really happen until there were bans on advertising and limits on consumption through things like taxation. We have to make some substantial changes.”
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