FDA Approves A Spray-on Virus To Keep Processed Meats ''Safe" -
But At What Price?
The FDA has approved a mix of six bacteria-killing viruses designed to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products. The viruses, called bacteriophages, kill the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium. This is the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive.
Listeria monocytogenes can cause a serious infection called listeriosis. About 2,500 people in the United States become seriously ill with listeriosis each year, and 500 die.
Lunch meats are particularly vulnerable to Listeria because they are generally not cooked or reheated after purchase.
Consumers will not be informed as to whether their meat and poultry products have been treated with the spray. Intralytix, the company that produces the virus spray, also plans to seek FDA approval for another bacteriophage product, this one designed to kill E. coli bacteria.
Yahoo News August 19, 2006
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Dr. Mercola's Comment (Sept 06):
This new process substitutes "spray and forget" for good hygiene and quality control for food. Bluntly speaking it provides meat vendors with more leeway to get away with poor quality control, poor hygiene and meat that's too old because it takes away some of the bacteria.
Economic pressure being what it is, there will be vendors who will take advantage of this and who will then have a competitive advantage over vendors that *do* pay attention to proper hygiene and quality control.
This could be a landmark event as it proposes to launch an enormously broad application of this bacterium-killing virus when only a select target group needs it. When meat leftovers containing this virus are disposed of, they will spread this virus throughout compost heaps and perhaps even into sewage sludge, providing a great opportunity for billions of bacteria to encounter this virus in great dilution under a variety of conditions.
Who is willing to bet that no bacteria will develop immunity? This strongly resembles the same irresponsible attitude that was at the bottom of the American habit to prescribe penicillin indiscriminately for everything from coughs and colds to sprained ankles.
There are no safeguards against the emergence of a new strain of Listeria that might develop and that is resistant to this particular virus.
Bacteria live in an ecosystem with competitive pressures. If you remove one bacterium like Listeria, you create an open invitation for any bacterium that isn't targeted by this specific virus.
What are the chances that we will be surprised by a newspaper article decrying the death of 100 elderly because they had sprayed luncheon meat in which very rare but virus-immune bacteria had developed (and had a chance to develop because standards of hygiene went down and the meat was kept out of the fridge for say 24 hours).
Applying this virus in the food system simply is not a good idea as:
- It's an enormous intervention that isn't really needed, because with proper hygiene and fresh produce you will not have difficulties for ordinary healthy people, and those with a weakened immune system or special vulnerabilities can simply take special care.
- Due to its intended broad and indiscriminate application, there are no safeguards whatsoever against this novel anti-bacterial weapon not being blunted by allowing billions of bacteria to encounter it in great dilution, develop immunity, and pass that immunity on to their colleagues (which is a known mechanism in bacteria).
- Like so many other "innovations" it only seems to benefit the producers of this virus by creating competitive pressures to use it if your competitor does so too (which is of course their good right, but not necessarily beneficial for society as a whole). This "innovation" will make processed meats an even more dangerous food choice than before.
If you haven't been concerned about processed meats yet, here's one more reason: At one point, the FDA had concerns this spray-on concoction might contain some toxic residue from the bacterial mix of sprays. The agency claims human contact with these residues in small quantities doesn't cause health problems, but are you willing to bet they won't?
Considering the increasingly experimental and dangerous nature of so much processed food -- like irradiation and genetic modification as well as this new spray -- there are many reasons to go organic.
You may have wondered on occasion if organic food is really better for you. Besides the fact that organic foods are not treated with sprays, radiation, or genetic modification, organic food differs right from the start, in the way that it is grown. Where traditional farmers apply chemical fertilizers to the soil to grow their crops, organic farmers feed and build soil with natural fertilizer.
Traditional farmers use insecticides to get rid of insects and disease, while organic farmers use natural methods such as insect predators and barriers for this purpose. Traditional farmers control weed growth by applying synthetic herbicides, but organic farmers use crop rotation, tillage, hand weeding, cover crops and mulches to control weeds.
The result is that conventionally grown food is often tainted with chemical residues, which can be harmful to humans. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers 60 percent of herbicides, 90 percent of fungicides and 30 percent of insecticides to be carcinogenic.
Pesticides can have many negative influences on health, including neurotoxicity, disruption of the endocrine system, carcinogenicity and immune system suppression. Pesticide exposure may also affect male reproductive function and has been linked to miscarriages in women.
Aside from pesticide contamination, conventional produce tends to have fewer nutrients than organic produce. On average, conventional produce has only 83 percent of the nutrients of organic produce. Studies have found significantly higher levels of nutrients such as vitamin C, iron, magnesium and phosphorus, and significantly less nitrates (a toxin) in organic crops.
There is little question that organic foods are superior to non-organic ones. However, I see many patients who are not eating any vegetables because they either cannot afford them or they are too difficult to obtain.
Please understand that it is better to eat non-organic vegetables than no vegetables at all. In the same vein, it is also important to realize that fresh non-organic vegetables will be better than wilted and rotten organic vegetables that are occasionally the only ones available in smaller organic produce stands.
Source: www.mercola.com
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Taming The Drug Monster (Corruption In The Pharmaceutical Industry)
by Patrick Holford (July 06)
A major shake down is brewing for the pharmaceutical industry following increasing reports of manipulating drug trial data, doctors and the government to increase sales and profits. A recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine published a correction on a study it published on Rofecoxib (Vioxx) – the now withdrawn pain-killer that is estimated to have damaged or killed up to 140,000 Americans – stating that increased cardiovascular risks were visible as early as four months into treatment, rather than the 18 months that Merck had claimed.
There are now an estimated 10,000 court cases outstanding against Vioxx manufacturer Merck – 400 of which are brought by patients in the UK who claim to have been damaged by the drug and not properly warned about the risks. The cost of legal actions to Merck has been put at between $5 and $50 billion. [1] As of April 2006, just six cases had been heard. In three, the plaintiffs were awarded damages running into millions of dollars. We don’t hear so much about this in the UK because plaintiffs here have been refused legal aid and insurers will not fund no-win, no-fee cases, so no cases can be brought.
This might sound like old news but this kind of manipulation of data is finally sounding big alarm bells within the medical profession. After all, commercial drug testing centres, funded by the company making the drug, are four times more likely to come up with favourable results than independent ones. [2] How can doctors know the science they’re being sold is free from spin?
Another shocking example recently emerged on a trial of the anti-depressant Seroxat. The summary at the start of the research paper, which is the only part most doctors read, claimed that Seroxat was ‘well tolerated and effective’.[3] But when a team of independent scientists looked at the whole paper, they found this: ‘Out of 93 children given Seroxat, 11 had serious ADRs [adverse drug reactions] compared with 2 in the placebo group’. [4] Just how serious? ‘Seven of these children were admitted to hospital during treatment.’
This kind of deceptive reporting in what are supposed to be objective research reports is making the medical profession increasingly nervous. After all, this is what they rely on to practice safe medicine. On 8 July 2006, the British Medical Journal ran an editorial suggesting that drug companies should not be allowed to evaluate their own products. Instead, to get their drugs tested and licensed they would contribute to a central pot for independent, publicly-funded clinical trials.
But, of course, it doesn’t stop there. Clinical practice guidelines advise doctors on the drugs to use for various conditions. However, 80 per cent of the academics who write them have financial links with the companies whose products they are recommending. [5] [6] Then, of course, there’s the wining and dining of doctors. Drug companies in America spend around $15 billion a year on marketing, which is about half the amount they spend on research and development. [7] A big chunk of this is spent selling drugs to doctors who have to clock up a certain number of days of ‘continuing medical education’, paid for, you guessed it, largely by the pharmaceutical industry. A recent article in the American Medical Association’s journal of ethics wants to put an end to this. ‘Only continuing medical education activities that are entirely free of pharmaceutical industry funding should qualify as education,’ they write. Continuing education should be funded by doctors, not drug companies, say the authors. And just in case you think these companies behave differently elsewhere, in the UK for instance, this is what the 2005 Parliamentary health committee investigation, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry, found: ‘[it] buys influence over doctors, charities, patient groups, journalists and politicians, whose regulation is sometimes weak or ambiguous.’
In the wake of the Vioxx scandal, the US FDA, the agency charged with protecting the public from the dangers of drugs, has been heavily criticised for not responding fast enough to problems with drugs, for being too close to the drug companies and for not devoting enough attention and resources to safety once a drug had been licensed. In May, a report by the US government’s General Accounting Office made damning criticisms of the FDA, saying that the agency ‘did not to have clear policies for addressing drug safety issues and that it sometimes excludes its best safety experts from important meetings’. Not only was it slow to respond but ‘the agency’s entire system for reviewing the safety of drugs already on the market is too limited and broadly flawed’. [8]
The pharmaceutical industry begs to differ. A spokesman from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry explicitly referred to the existing state of affairs between all the parties concerned – except for patients – and implied that as far as they were concerned, it was working fine. ‘The challenge is to acknowledge there is a contract between industry, regulators and health service which recognises that there is a trade-off between risks and benefits.’ [9]
With an estimated death toll of over 10,000 Britons every year from adverse drug reactions, and over 40,000 made seriously ill enough to require hospitalisation, that’s one hell of a trade off. [10]
‘Full spectrum dominance’ is the stated aim of the American military. It involves being ready ‘to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations’. Not a bad description of what the pharmaceutical industry has achieved across the whole field of prescription drugs, from creating to selling. Besides dominating the clinical trials production line, the drug companies have also found ways of exerting control over researchers, medical journals, doctors and even patient groups. The industry’s strategy for maintaining their full spectrum dominance all the way down the drug chain is very simple – they pay for it.
‘Something is very wrong,’ writes Dr John Abramson of Harvard University in his brilliant and disturbing book Overdosed America,‘with a system that leads patients to demand and doctors to prescribe a drug that provides no better relief and causes significantly more side effects’.
These recent and growing recommendations to sever the financial and information stranglehold big pharma has on medicine may, at last, provide a more level playing field in which it will become increasingly obvious that, for most chronic diseases, nutrition works better than drugs. It’s time we stopped swallowing what the drug industry tells us.
Source: www.patrickholford.com
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Don't Be Fooled By The Omega 3 Scam
The headlines in the newspapers read ‘Experts cast doubts on Omega 3’- BBC.., ‘The benefits of fish and linseed oils as elixir of life are another health myth’- The Times…, ‘The Benefits of Omega 3 Seem Fishy’ - CBS News.
This is due to a ‘systematic review’ of studies on omega 3 and it’s effects on cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality, published on Friday in the British Medical Journal. This is not a new study, but a study of studies. The authors conclude that ‘omega 3 fats don’t have a clear effect on total mortality, combined cardiovascular events or cancer.’
It’s my job to read and analyse the whole paper and it soon becomes clear there is something very fishy going on. The main analysis is on 15 ‘randomised controlled studies’. Of these studies nine show benefit of omega 3, five show no big difference, and one is shown as negative. So nine for omega 3, one against. The author of the ‘negative’ study, Dr Bemelmans from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands questions how his study could be used to turn this review paper from positive to negative. For good reason. If you read the abstract of this paper (which you’ll find on-line by typing in Bemelmans + margarin) the first thing you’ll find is that this isn’t a study on fish or fish oils, it’s a study on margarine! The authors gave their subjects a margarine containing alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) – that’s the omega 3 found in flax – or linoleic acid (omega 6) and found ‘no significant difference existed in the 10 year estimated heart disease risk.’
The first thing you realise is this first analysis isn’t about the benefits of concentrated omega fish oils, which contain EPA and DHA. The numerous studies that show benefit, not only for those who have heart disease, but also in preventing those that don’t, have given substantial amounts of EPA, which seems to be the more powerful kind of omega 3 for the heart. A mere 5% of ALA is converted to EPA so there’s a world of difference between taking a fish oil supplement and eating an ALA enriched margarine!
Later in the paper the authors do analyse all the studies using fish derived sources of omega 3. They include twelve studies, nine of which show a benefit, one of which shows no effect and two show a very small negative effect. However, combined, in the way that this review analyses the data, this seemingly obvious beneficial effect doesn’t come up as significant.
What I find particularly deceptive I that this obvious skew is not even discussed in the research paper. It really makes me question the integrity of the authors and the journal. Let’s explore that for a minute with a ‘conspiracy theory’ hat on. Last week pharmaceutical drug sales topped $600 billion. The number one best seller was Lipitor, a stin drug for lowering cholesterol. It brought in $12.9 billion. Next is Plavix, for thinning the blood ($5.9 million), closely followed by Zocor, the worlds’s first over the counter statin ($5.3 billion). Next is Norvasc, for high blood pressure ($5 billion). So that’s almost $24 billion dollars for the top four cardiovascular drugs. The natural alternatives for this pharmaceutical goldmine are omega 3's, B vitamins for lowering homocysteine, niacin specifically for lowering cholesterol, magnesium for lowering blood pressure and all the vital lifestyle changes such as exercise. If you wanted to maximise profits it would be worth investing in belittling your competitors. It’s worth bearing this in mind when you read newspaper headlines. That, and the fact that big news headlines sell.
As a scientist this review doesn’t change my recommendations one iota. I’m not alone. Tom Sanders, Professor of Nutrition, King’s College, London who is often quoted as being dismissive of supplementation says “ It is disappointing that when the vast majority of the evidence points to the positive benefits of Omega-3 Fish Oils for heart, that one review paper can cause so much concern amongst consumers.” Dr Mike Knapton, director of prevention and care at the British Heart Foundation "People should not stop consuming omega-3 fats or eating oily fish as a result of this study."
I couldn’t agree more. There is nothing in this study that makes me cautious about recommending eating oily fish three times a week and/or taking an omega 3 rich fish oil supplement every day, not just for your heart, but also your brain, joints, skin and immune system.
Source: www.patrickholford.com
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Is Alternative Medicine Any Less Scientific ?
by Patrick Holford
No doubt some of you will have all the anti-alternative medicine propaganda in the papers. I wholeheartedly agree that good medicine needs to be properly proven to work, which is why I abhor the fact that almost a third of all drugs are prescribed ‘off label’, meaning that they are given to groups of people for whom no benefit has been proven.
I thought the most astute response to this cry against alternative medicine was that made in the Times by Jerome Burne, kindly reproduced below:
‘Professor Michael Baum, who laid into alternative medicine, is quite right to be concerned about wasting scarce NHS funds on “unproven or disproved” treatments. Unfortunately he has the wrong target in his sights. If he’s looking to root out marketing dressed up as science and protect patients from being damaged by side-effect that have been deliberately kept hidden, he would do far better to focus on problems with prescription drugs.
While some are life-saving, far too many are marginally effective and carry risks out of proportion to the conditions they are designed to treat. Drug side-effects now kill around 10,000 people a year in the UK – three times the number killed on the roads - and cost the NHS over £4 billion. Patients are being perfectly rational in seeking alternatives and it is simply out-dated medical arrogance to condemn them for it.
Only last week it emerged that one of the anti-depressant SSRI drugs actually increased the risk of young adults committing suicide – a possibility the companies had always strenuously denied even though in 2003 doctors had been advised not to give these drugs to anyone under 18 because of a suicide link. The evidence for that official ruling dated to 1996 but had never been published. During the intervening years UK doctors were prescribing more SSRIs to children than any other country in Europe and yet there was no proper evidence base for this at all. Treating those children by changing their diet or with acupuncture seems sane and responsible by comparison.
The scandal surrounding the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx - withdrawn from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risk of developing heart disease and other vascular problems – is another example of a drug that was heavily over-hyped prescribed to millions for whom it was not appropriate. Evidence that there was a danger was once again downplayed or ignored; one expert estimate puts just the number of Americans killed or damaged by a drug they took to ease aching joints at 140,000.
Professor Baum demonstrates no understanding why people are searching for alternatives to his remedies. In any other business, blaming your customers for deserting you would be regarded as a bizarre and self-defeating management strategy. If he’s serious about patient safety and cutting costs, he could start by demanding that drug disasters are followed by an official enquiry and that testing of promising non-drug therapies is properly funded.’
Jerome and I have spent the last year working on a book, Food is Better Medicine than Drugs, which will really blow the lid on the the quasi-science and poor risk benefit ratio of the major profit-earning drugs, compared to a nutritional approach.
Source: www.patrickholford.com
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Another Reason Sodas Cause Cancer
Traces of the cancer-causing chemical benzene have been found in French and British soft drinks, at levels up to eight times those allowed in drinking water.
This follows on the heels of similar results for drinks tested in the United States.
It has been known for 15 years that sodium benzoate, a preservative, can produce benzene when mixed with ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Many are concerned that the two chemicals are still being mixed together in many drinks.
Although no more than one part per billion of benzene is allowed in drinking water in Britain, there are no legal restrictions on the amount present in soft drinks.
Benzene is associated with leukemia and other cancers of the blood. It is generally found in pollutants such as car exhaust fumes.
BBC News March 1, 2006
Times Online.co.uk March 2, 2006
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Dr. Mercola's Comment (16 Mar 06):
From my perspective, one of the easiest and most important changes anyone can make in improving their health is to stop ALL sodas immediately. There simply isn't ANY excuse in my book to ever consume these drinks.
The primary reason to avoid them is that they are highly pernicious to your health and relatively easy to avoid. If for some reason you have trouble kicking the soda habit try the turbo tapping technique.
Fortunately we do appear to be winning this battle and the NY Times reported last week that for the first time in 20 years soft drink consumption in the US went down.
Soft drinks not only have either sugar or artificial sweeteners, which sabotage your health, but are also potentially dirtier than toilet water.
This study outlines yet another reason you need to stay away from them.
This shouldn't be a big surprise to the soft drink industry, considering how long they've known about the chemical reaction that produces benzene.
But despite that, manufacturers have been putting ascorbic acid back into their products lately, hoping parents will be fooled into buying vitamin C-enhanced "health drinks" that give the appearance of being far healthier than they really are.
It's astonishing that there are different standards for the presence of benzene in soft drinks versus drinking water in the first place. But benzene is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to soft drinks.
They are the top source of calories in America. There is no doubt that soda consumption is the largest source of high-fructose modified corn syrup in this country. And exposure to that sugar will devastate your insulin and leptin levels, damaging your health and increasing your risk of many diseases.
Diet soft drinks are no bargain either, with artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose contributing to a good deal of toxic side effects.
If you really want to do what's best for your health, stick to pure water as your beverage of choice.
Source: www.mercola.com
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PFOA (used to make nonstick and stain-resistant materials) to Be Eliminated
In January 2006, eight companies agreed to an EPA agreement to eliminate perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) from consumer products within the next decade.
PFOA, used to make nonstick and stain-resistant materials, has been linked with cancer and birth defects in animals. The chemical has been detected in the blood of 95% of Americans and in marine organisms and polar bears.
Currently, PFOA can be found in a wide variety of consumer products, including food packaging, nonstick cookware, and fabrics. Under the terms of the pact, companies will have to reduce manufacturing emissions of PFOA and trace amounts of the compound in consumer products by 95% by no later than 2010. PFOA should be completely eliminated by 2015.
by Erin E. Dooley
http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2006/114-4/forum.html#beat
