Food and Health Rethought

According to a new study published in Current Medical Chemistry, children up to 6 months of age receive 14.7 to 49 times more aluminum from vaccines than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety limits allow.

Like other adjuvants, aluminum is added to the vaccine in order to boost your immune response to the antigen. The antigen is what your body responds to and makes antibodies against (the lab altered bacteria or virus being injected). By boosting your body’s immune response, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive.

As researchers wrote in Current Medicinal Chemistry:

“Experimental research … clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.”

When you or your child is injected with an aluminum containing vaccine, the aluminum compounds it contains accumulate not only at the site of injection but can travel to your brain and accumulate there. In your brain, aluminum can enter neurons and glial cells (astrocytes and microglia). Studies have shown that aluminum can activate microglia and do so for long periods, which means that the aluminum in your vaccination may be priming your microglia to overreact.

The average aluminum content per vaccine ranges between 200 to 400 mcg, but if your child receives multiple vaccines at one time, which is common, the dose will rise much higher. Based on the number of vaccines given, children today are receiving 17 shots that contain aluminum, compared to four vaccines in the 1970s into the mid-80s. According to Dr. Ayoub’s calculations, the milligram dose of childhood explosure to aluminum in vaccines  has more than doubled in that time.

This link has a bit more…

And we found just an enormously high percentage of children with autism who had very high aluminum burdens.

And one of the things you hear by so-called experts who try to allay people’s fears about aluminum and say, “Well, you know, aluminum makes up 8% of our earth’s crust.” It’s in the in the air. It’s in the soil. It’s in the water and so forth. And that may very well be true. It is a very common substance outside of the body but it has absolutely no biological role in the body. It is not a necessary or essential for any biological function in any animal or plant for that matter

the animal model is impressive. They’ve replicated virtually all of the brain changes in Alzheimer’s in experimental models that are exposed to aluminum.

we have an explosion of autism in the Western world. I think, for decades, the incidence was like one in 10,000. Now, it’s down to 1 in 100. Literally a hundred fold increase over the last 20 years or so, and it continues. Every study that looks at it seems to be progressively increasing to the point where we have it down to 1 in 20 before we know it.

This link reiterates the above points.

people are less likely to yawn when the heat outdoors exceeds body temperature.

The cooling effect of yawning is thought to result from enhanced blood flow to the brain caused by stretching of the jaw, as well as countercurrent heat exchange with the ambient air that accompanies the deep inhalation.

via slashdot

“Tiny bits of genetic material, called microRNAs, can make their way from the food you eat into your blood stream, and change how your genes are expressed, according to a new study. A team of Chinese scientists found tiny bits of white rice microRNA floating around in people’s blood after a meal. When they looked at what was happening on a cellular level, they found that the microRNAs were changing gene expression, decreasing levels of a receptor that filters out LDL (bad) cholesterol. When the scientists gave mice both rice and a chemical to block the microRNAs, their levels of that receptor returned to normal—-showing that the microRNAs weren’t just swimming through the blood stream, but acting on genes in the animals’ cells.”

I see this as more evidence that we really don’t understand all the ways in which food affects us. Additionally I see it as more evidence that we should eat foods for which we are evolutionarily designed. It’s difficult to know and understand all the effects of foods we are are not used to. Having worked in a laboratory where drugs are tested, I can tell you that foreign compounds are usually not a good thing for any organism.

Perhaps locally grown produce tastes better to some people. And perhaps it is psychologically better to have close contact with the people who grow your food. But that doesn’t make it good for the environment. For example, it is twice as energy efficient for people in Britain to eat dairy products from New Zealand than from domestic producers. It is four times more energy efficient for them to eat lamb shipped from the other side of the world than it is to eat British lamb. That’s because transporting the final product accounts for only a small part of the energy consumed in the production and delivery of food. It’s far better to eat foods from places where production itself is more efficient. For example, New Zealand cattle eat clover from the fields while British livestock tend to rely on feed — which itself is often imported.

Exercise improves sleep efficiency shortening the amount of time you need to sleep.

via http://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-reduce-the-amount-of-sleep-I-need-every-night/answer/Mattias-Petter-Johansson#ans722575

Vast research supports the contention that individuals engaged in regular exercise training require more dietary protein than sedentary individuals.

Protein intakes of 1.4 – 2.0 g/kg/day for physically active individuals is not only safe, but may improve the training adaptations to exercise training.

The current recommended level of protein intake (0.8 g/kg/day) is estimated to be sufficient to meet the need of nearly all (97.5%) healthy men and women age 19 years and older. This amount of protein intake may be appropriate for non-exercising individuals, but it is likely not sufficient to offset the oxidation of protein/amino acids during exercise (approximately 1–5% of the total energy cost of exercise) nor is it sufficient to provide substrate for lean tissue accretion or for the repair of exercise induced muscle damage

Relative to endurance exercise, recommended protein intakes range from of 1.0 g/kg to 1.6 g/kg per day [2,4,7,15] depending on the intensity and duration of the endurance exercise, as well as the training status of the individual. For example, an elite endurance athlete requires a greater level of protein intake approaching the higher end the aforementioned range (1.0 to 1.6 g/kg/day). Additionally, as endurance exercise increases in intensity and duration, there is an increased oxidation of branched-chain amino acids, which creates a demand within the body for protein intakes at the upper end of this range. Strength/power exercise is thought to increase protein requirements even more than endurance exercise, particularly during the initial stages of training and/or sharp increases in volume. Recommendations for strength/power exercise typically range from 1.6 to 2.0 g/kg/day [3,11-13,16], although some research suggests that protein requirements may actually decrease during training due to biological adaptations that improve net protein retention

Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good.

The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.

It has been known for more than 4 decades that exercise causes increases in skeletal muscle mitochondrial enzyme content and activity (i.e., mitochondrial biogenesis). Increasing evidence now suggests that exercise can induce mitochondrial biogenesis in a wide range of tissues not normally associated with the metabolic demands of exercise. Perturbations in mitochondrial content and (or) function have been linked to a wide variety of diseases, in multiple tissues, and exercise may serve as a potent approach by which to prevent and (or) treat these pathologies. In this context, the purpose of this review is to highlight the effects of exercise, and the underlying mechanisms therein, on the induction of mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle, adipose tissue, liver, brain, and kidney.

3 sources all say no. The only liability is the headache that you might get because your eyes have to work harder. But it doesn’t affect the health of your eyes.

. In a new study over the presence of contaminants in the drinking water, researchers analyzed water samples from 19 US drinking water treatment plants (DWTP) which serve more than 28 million people. Sucralose was found in source water of 15 out of 19 water samples, finished water of 13 out of 17, and distribution system water of 8 our of 12. 

In my judgment this is yet another example of the failure of the municipal water systems, and a reason why I typically avoid them. In general, water treatment plants don’t do as good a job as mother nature, so study the source of your water.

…a Duke University study shows that at Sucralose consumption levels of 1.1–11 mg/kg (below the FDA ‘safe’ level), a 12-week administration of Splenda exerted numerous adverse effects, including reduction in beneficial fecal microflora, increased fecal pH, and enhanced expression levels of P-gp, CYP3A4, and CYP2D1, which are known to limit the bioavailability of nutrients and orally administered drugs. This study has been the subject of some controversy, with experts on both sides of the argument….