Former Monsanto VP Seeking Top FDA Spot

February 6, 2012

Natural News

By S.D. Wells

The one man who may be responsible for more food related illnesses and deaths than anyone in history, Michael R. Taylor, has just been promoted from US Food Safety Czar to Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of the FDA, a position which would enable the giant biotech company Monsanto to silently and legally feed cancer causing vegetables to every living person who is not 100% strictly organic.

President Obama has appointed the former Monsanto Vice President and lobbyist Michael R. Taylor to the throne. This is the same man who was Food Safety Czar for the FDA when Genetically Modified Organisms were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety or risks. This is like putting a terrorist in charge of the world’s food supply. What will the cancer numbers look like in 2016?

The GMO nightmare all started with the Dan Quayle led FDA/GMO marriage. Under George Bush Senior’s Administration from 1989 to 1993, Dan Quayle single-handedly catapulted GMO’s into existence through FDA’s anti-consumer right-to-know policy, which stated that GMO foods did not have to be labeled or safety tested. Yes, you read that correctly: There is no safety testing required whatsoever to take some Agent Orange pesticide and genetically mutate the seeds of vegetables in a chemical laboratory so that nothing on planet earth will eat the plant that grows from the ground except for all the humans who have no idea what happened.

Michael Taylor is part of a revolving door at the FDA, where Monsanto Execs just come and go as they please. First, Michael R. Taylor was an assistant to the FDA commissioner. Then he left to work for a law firm in the 1980′s to help gain FDA approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone (rGBH), which is directly linked to cancer. Then he became deputy commissioner of the FDA in 1991, and was later re-appointed to the FDA in 2009 by Obama. He is the food villain who tried his best to keep this “malignant milk of the turn of the century” from being labeled.

Michael Taylor is the epitome of everything Monsanto represents. Taylor is like a vehicle for Monsanto’s patenting of seeds and global domination of farming. He implements the government’s “favorable” agricultural biotech policies because it’s much more of a financially sure shot to use RoundUp in food than to farm organically and ethically. If the investments aren’t paying enough at the corporation, Execs just switch over to Federal Regulations and write some new Legislation based on “tainted research”, which allows them to pile more toxins on the American public and bankroll off it when they flip back to the corporate side.

Click here for full report from Natural News.

How Far Is Too Far In Sugar Prohibition?

February 6, 2012

The Independent

By Rob Lyons

On Thursday, high-profile science journal Nature published a commentary by three academics, which argued that sugar is a toxin and that it should be subject to similar kinds of public-health interventions as alcohol. In other words, sugar should be taxed and restricted just like booze.

One of the authors, Robert Lustig, runs an obesity clinic at a children’s hospital, part of the University of California, San Francisco. His colleagues and fellow authors, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis, are researchers in healthy policy. Lustig has gained an online following since 2009 for a lecture entitled ‘Sugar: the Bitter Truth’. While Lustig’s tone is rather melodramatic, there does appear to be a growing body of evidence linking refined carbohydrates and a group of related symptoms – obesity, fatty liver disease, type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease – that come together under the broad umbrella of ‘metabolic syndrome’.

It’s certainly the case that these chronic diseases have increased in importance in recent decades (in part because of the decline of infectious disease). Consumption of refined carbohydrates – particularly sugar – has increased, too. America has a particularly sweet tooth; the average American consumes 131 pounds (about 59 kg) of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) per year, up from 113 pounds per person in 1966. A teaspoon of sugar weighs about 4g, so this amounts to 40 teaspoons per person per day. (And remember, that’s an average – some people are consuming considerably more.)

The UK has a pretty sweet tooth, too. A survey for the Food Standards Agency in Scotland in 2008 found that 17 per cent of children’s calorie intake was coming from ‘non-milk extrinsic sugars’ – that is, table sugar and sugar added to food. That adds up to about 20 teaspoons per child per day.

So, we have rising rates of diseases related to metabolic syndrome alongside increased sugar consumption. Sucrose (the kind used as table sugar) and HFCS are regarded as particularly problematic by many researchers because they are both mad up of two simpler sugars, glucose and fructose. Glucose induces the production of insulin and would seem, therefore, to be a reasonable suspect in problems of insulin resistance and diabetes, with knock-on effects to do with obesity. Fructose, though it sounds healthy because it is also found in fruit, is practically Public Enemy No.1 for some health researchers due to its effects on the liver and in relation to heart disease. Thus, some see the consumption of sucrose and HFCS as a dietary double-whammy that significantly increases the risk of a number of chronic diseases.

Click here for the full report from The Independent.

Ground Beef Recalled Due to E. Coli Contamination

August 16th, 2011

AboutLawsuits.com

More than 60,000 pounds of ground beef from the National Beef Packing Co. has been recalled because of the risk of E. coli food poisoning.

The ground beef recall was announced on August 12 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) after Ohio health department inspectors found contamination by E. coli O157:H7 during a routine inspection of one of National Beef Packing Co.’s products. There have been no food poisoning reports linked to the contaminated beef.

The recall affects 60,424 pounds of National Beef ground beef chubs produced on July 23, 2011, with a Freeze by Date of August 12, 2011, and ground beef chubs produced on July 25, 2011 with a Freeze by Date of August 14, 2011. All of the affected beef has an establishment number “Est. 262″ in the USDA mark of inspection.

A full list of products affected by the recall is available in the FSIS recall notice. The FSIS has also provided a full retail distribution list (pdf). The meat was shipped to Kroger, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, Winn Dixe and Publix stores nationwide. The FSIS warns that the ground beef may have been repackaged for sale to consumers.

E. coli O157:H7 is one of the more common causes of food poisoning in the United States. When left untreated, it can lead to dehydration and potentially life-threatening illness. While most healthy adults recover from food poisoning caused by E. coli within a few weeks, young children and the elderly could be at risk for more severe illness. If the toxin enters the blood stream, E. coli could also lead to kidney failure known as Hemolytic-Urenia Syndrome (HUS).

Consumers with questions can contact the company by calling (816)713-8631.

Click here for the full report from AboutLawsuits.com

MSG Hidden In Variety Of Foods And Contributing To Illness

August 2nd, 2011

Natural News

By: Christy Pooschke

Despite common perception, the toxic food additive MSG is everywhere – not just in Chinese food! This taste enhancer is actually hidden under dozens of ingredient names in all sorts of processed foods, restaurant foods, beverages, chewing gums, vitamins and supplements. It is added to foods in higher dosages than ever before, and more and more people are experiencing symptoms.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a health concern because it contains glutamate. Glutamate is the salt form of “Free Glutamic Acid” – a toxin that is associated with many health problems. Due to insufficient labeling laws, food companies use many ingredients to disguise Free Glutamic Acid in their products, so consumers must look for more than just “MSG” on food labels.

To understand why processed Free Glutamic Acid is associated with so many health problems, it is helpful to learn about natural Glutamic Acid – an amino acid (a building block of protein) that occurs naturally in the body as one of many excitatory neurotransmitters (chemicals that “excite” cells into action). Glutamic Acid occurs naturally in certain unprocessed, whole foods (e.g., tomatoes). In this natural form, it is bound (i.e., linked) together with other amino acids to form a protein. Once ingested, the protein is broken down slowly by the digestive system. The Glutamic Acid is released gradually into the blood stream and is non-toxic. If one ingests more than the body needs, the cells clear away the excess just as they were designed to do. The digestion of these natural, whole food sources releases such a small amount of Glutamic Acid that even people who react to processed MSG can usually tolerate them.

When food manufacturers break down a protein (usually from corn, soy or wheat) to make processed Free Glutamic Acid, they “free” the glutamic acid from the links that bind it to other amino acids in nature. When one ingests this already-broken-down, free form of Glutamic Acid, blood levels of glutamate can spike to more than 20 times the usual amount because the digestive system does not have to work to break down the links. The human nervous system is not equipped to handle such quickly-absorbed doses. The excess glutamate cannot be efficiently cleared away, so it accumulates around the cells throughout the body, over-exciting them to the point of damage or death.

This disruption at the cellular level leads to a range of physiological reactions that may be as minor as a runny nose or as life-threatening as a heart attack. According to experts like Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D., Free Glutamic Acid is a toxin, not an allergen. Some people are more sensitive to lower dosages than others, but it affects everyone to some degree. There is often a delay between ingestion and onset of symptoms, preventing many people from realizing the connection. Most acute symptoms will display within 48 hours (many within 30 minutes) of ingestion, but some health effects (e.g., obesity, infertility) have been demonstrated in lab mice long after exposure.

Because glutamate receptors line various organs and tissues (brain, heart, lungs, reproductive organs, digestive tract, etc.) throughout the body, ingesting processed Free Glutamic Acid can disrupt just about any system and cause a wide variety of symptoms. Luckily, much of this damage is reversible, and many sufferers resolve their symptoms (often within 7-10 days) by completely eliminating Free Glutamic Acid from their diets. To prevent these effects and to avoid this hidden additive, one must prepare meals at home from basic, whole food ingredients; minimize reliance on processed foods; read every ingredient list; and avoid any mysterious or vague ingredients on product labels.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

High Fructose Corn Syrup Contaminated With Mercury

July 11, 2011

Natural News

By Mike Adams

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is used as a sweetener in thousands of mainstream packaged foods sold in the United States and around the world, from bread to soda and even breakfast cereal. It has been blamed for increasing the number of empty calories in the U.S. diet, and researchers have linked it to type-2 diabetes and obesity.

Beyond the link to detrimental health effects, another danger from this ubiquitous ingredient comes from the toxic chemicals that are used to turn corn into corn starch and then finally into HFCS. One of these chemicals,glutaraldehyde, is a toxic chemical used in industrial water treatment systems and to sterilize medical equipment by killing living cells. It’s also a well-known embalming chemical. It is toxic to the human body and causes eye, nose, throat and lung irritation (asthma, sneezing, wheezing, burning eyes, etc.). It can also cause drowsiness, dizziness and headaches.

The chemical is so toxic that it can actually burn a hole in your stomach.

Click here to read the full article from NaturalNews.com.

Chemical Used in Food Containers Added to U.S. List of Carcinogens

June 14, 2011

Bloomberg

By Jeffrey Young

The widely used preservative formaldehyde, and styrene, found in food containers and coffee cups, are among eight agents added to a list of known and suspected carcinogens by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Formaldehyde, linked to leukemia and a rare type of nasal cancer, is “known to be a human carcinogen,” according to the congressionally mandated report published today on the health agency’s website. Styrene is categorized by researchers as “reasonably anticipated” to be cancer-causing.

The new compounds bring the total number of substances linked to cancer to 240. Aristolochic acids, found in herbal products used to treat arthritis and gout, were also listed as a known carcinogen because they can cause bladder or urinary-tract cancer in people with kidney disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cautioned consumers against taking supplements containing aristolochic acid in 2001, according to the report.

“A listing in the report does not by itself mean that a substance will cause cancer,” said John Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, in a conference call with reporters.

The cancer-causing risk from formaldehyde and styrene comes from the products’ widespread use in industrial applications and less from their presence in consumer products, Bucher said.

Click here to read the full report from Bloomberg.

Harmful Chemical Found in Tap Water of 31 U.S. Cities

December 20th, 2010

CNN

Millions of Americans in at least 31 U.S. cities could be drinking tap water contaminated with the harmful chemical hexavalent chromium, according to a report released Monday by the non-profit Environmental Working Group.

While the dangerous carcinogen, otherwise known as chromium-6, may sound foreign to most people, perhaps the name Erin Brockovich will ring a bell.

After chromium-6 was discovered in the water supply of Hinkley, California, Brockovich helped bring about a lawsuit that ultimately ended in 1996 with the utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, paying more than $330 million in damages. Norman, Oklahoma; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Riverside, California, top the non-profit organization’s list of cities with water supplies contaminated by chromium-6.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency does not require water utilities to test for chromium-6, and has not established a legal threshold for how much can be in our water, the agency has classified the toxin as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

“I was expecting to find hexavalent chromium in some of the cities we checked, but I didn’t expect it to be so widespread,” said Rebecca Sutton, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group and the lead author of the study.

Sutton said there is a well-documented corollary between exposure to chromium-6 and a greater risk of stomach cancer in humans. Additionally, there is ample animal evidence showing a broad risk of gastrointestinal tumors in rats and mice exposed to the toxin, she said.

Worse, skipping tap water in favor of bottled water does not guarantee you’ll be protected.

“Bottled water is not necessarily any safer than tap water,” said Sutton. “We just don’t have any guarantee that hexavalent chromium isn’t in that water.”

So how can you protect yourself? Sutton says your best bet is buying an effective water filter.

“Getting the water filter is a great way to protect yourself and your family,” says Sutton. “It’s a step you can take yourself; you don’t have to wait for government action.”

Samples from the test provided a “one-time snapshot” of water systems that serve 26 million people, the Environmental Working Group said. But the organization said the results show that more federal regulation of the cancer-causing chemical is needed.

The National Toxicology Program has said that chromium-6 in drinking water shows “clear evidence of carcinogenic activity.”

California’s state environmental agency has proposed capping levels of the chemical in drinking water at 0.06 parts per billion. The Environmental Working Group said 25 of the cities it tested showed exceeded that level.

To conduct its test, the organization said it recruited volunteers in 35 cities to collect tap water samples “from unfiltered taps in homes or in public buildings such as hospitals, libraries and malls,” the report said.

Click here for the full report from CNN

Aspartame Causes Premature Births

November 2nd, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

Regular consumption of artificial sweeteners by pregnant women may increase their risk of premature birth, according to a study funded by the European Union and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Researchers interviewed almost 60,000 pregnant Danish women about their soft-drink consumption, then compared these data with the results of the women’s births. They found that drinking one can of diet soda per day increased her risk of giving birth prematurely by 38 percent compared with women who never drank diet soda. Drinking four or more of the beverages per day increased the risk of preterm birth by 78 percent.

A preterm birth is defined as taking place before the 38th week of pregnancy.

No connection was found between sugared soda consumption and premature birth, suggesting that artificial sweeteners may be playing a role in the effect. The researchers suggested that premature births may be triggered in part by the neurotoxin methanol, which is generated by some artificial sweeteners. Sweeteners may also generate formaldehyde, another known toxin.

Prior studies have also shown that the artificial sweetener saccharin builds up in the placenta.

“I would think it is prudent for pregnant women to diminish consumption of these drinks and possibly those foods containing artificial sweeteners,” said Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex.

Mary Ellen Sherry of the University of Tennessee Medical Center was cautious about the results, noting, “There are a lot of risk factors for prematurity. Poor nutritional health is one. Underweight is one.”

She urged women to start taking care of their bodies and eating a balanced diet even before becoming pregnant, if possible, making sure to get plenty of protein, calcium and folic acid.

As for diet soft drinks, she pointed out that they provide no nutritional benefit to your diet, so you lose nothing by giving them up.

“If you are afraid of it, don’t do it,” she said. “That’s one thing that’s easy to give up, diet drinks.”

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Your Next MRI Could Cost You Your Life

September 13, 2010

Natural News

by Jonathan Benson

Patients who undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are often given drug injections to enhance the quality of scan images. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that these drugs will now require a black box warning label–the strongest in the industry–because they can cause a rare, and sometimes fatal, condition known as nephrogenic fibrosing dermopathy (NFD).

The drugs contain a magnetic, metallic chemical called gadolinium that travels throughout the heart and other organs to help clarify image quality during scans. Gadolinium is a known liver toxin that is also harmful to the unhealthy kidneys, but the FDA has permitted its use in medical imaging drugs since 1988.

Symptoms of NFD include skin hardening as well as tissue growth in the eyes, internal organs and joints.

Seven MRI drugs containing gadolinium have been approved by the FDA, and all can cause NFD in patients with kidney disease. But three in particular are “chemically more unstable” than the others, according to the FDA, meaning they are more likely to release the toxic chemical into the liver. These three are Bayer Healthcare’s Magnevist, General Electric Healthcare’s Omniscan and Covidien’s Optimark.

Rather than pull the drug, the FDA is requiring stronger labeling that instructs physicians to use the drug only on patients who have healthy kidneys. It also instructs physicians to screen all patients for kidney disease prior to administering any gadolinium-containing drugs.

Back in 2006, the FDA announced that it was aware of gadolinium’s dangers, but for whatever reason did not issue a black box warning at that time. The FDA continues to suggest that gadolinium is safe to use in patients with healthy kidneys, even though there is no evidence that the drug does not harm healthy kidneys.

According to reports, there are two imaging drugs on the market that do no contain gadolinium, but the FDA has only approved them for use during liver scans.

Click here to read the full report

Using Pharmaceuticals as Weapons

March 1, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.

When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn’t rhetoric, it’s an historical fact.)

Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.

It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?

Weapons of Mass Prescription
What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? One way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.

And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines. I even published a cartoon with this theme a couple of years ago.

Here’s another interesting fact: If you examine what’s in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you’ll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.

Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it’s not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.

Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.

Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry — an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people’s mouths as “silver fillings” (which actually contain more mercury than silver).

There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry — especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.

These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That’s why I call them ‘Weapons of Mass Prescription.’

Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens
If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals.

Click here for the full report

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