Taking prescription drugs during pregnancy can do terrible harm to the baby growing inside you

Dr. Mary Newport sees the symptoms more and more in the babies she treats: oddly stiff limbs, severe tremors, vomiting, diarrhea, insomnia, crying that never stops. The common denominator: Their mothers were taking prescription drugs, mostly painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin, and anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax during pregnancy.

Avoid drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. Protect your baby from needless suffering.
Read article in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida/USA)

If you are feeling low and all seems hopeless

This amazing and inspiring 20 minute film may lift your spirits: The Butterfly Circus.

High Pesticide Levels in NZ Fruit and Vegetables

The levels of pesticide residue present in New Zealand fruit and vegetables, shown in a recently released study, are the worst ever, say pro-organic food lobby groups.
Read article in the New Zealand Herald (New Zealand)

If you hate to waste food

If you hate to waste food, there is a website that can help you: Love Food: Hate Waste. There are lots of ideas, suggestions and recipes, and you can send in your own to add to the wealth of information already there. Save money; save time; save effort; save waste.

Overweight pregnant women have been targeted with unhelpful advice from Professor Mike Kelly, NICE public health director.

This BBC News article explains that "if a woman is obese during pregnancy, she has an increased risk of developing serious complications like pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, miscarriage and stillbirth. She is also more likely to have a Caesarean section. NICE says women with a body mass index of more than 30 should be encouraged to lose weight before they become pregnant. During pregnancy, losing weight can be harmful to the unborn child, so women are advised to eat healthily and to do gentle exercise."

Unfortunately, in the audio clip from this morning's Radio 4 Today programme, Professor Kelly gives two unhelpful pieces of advice. I'm with him when he says to avoid sugary drinks and drink plenty of water, but when he says that 'healthy eating' for everyone should be based on starchy food and avoiding fatty food I disagree. I believe a healthy diet is logically one that approximates to a Stone Age ('Paleo') diet, and is low in carbohydrates. But the most important advice of all for pregnant women is to avoid salt and salty food. This is the safe way to avoid fluid retention and excess weight gain. And it does not entail going hungry or counting calories.

During pregnancy, because of the hormone changes it brings, a woman is vulnerable to salt/sodium. If during this vulnerable time she eats salty food, her blood volume will rise more than it would if she were not eating salty food. This is because high oestrogen in the blood stream causes the muscles in the walls of the blood vessels to relax and so the blood vessels allow in more sodium and the water it attracts to itself. The veins become swollen.

When the baby is born the hormone levels change again and the oestrogen level goes down. The muscles in the walls of the blood vessels tighten up again and some of the excess salt and water in the blood is excreted. But if the veins were badly overstretched and weakened during the pregnancy, the woman will not return to her former weight. With each succeeding pregnancy, the problem will worsen; the veins will become weaker and more swollen; the blood volume will rise further; she will become more overweight.

See Pregnancy Advice about Salt.

How to lose weight.

Vulnerable Groups.

Court of Protection: listen to File on 4 on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 27 July at 2000 BST

File on 4 is always well worth listening to, and I think this programme about problems experienced by people under the protection of this court will be an eye-opener (ear-opener!) for most listeners. It will be repeated on Sunday 1 August, at 1700 BST. You can listen via BBC iPlayer or download the podcast.

Since I first read/heard about the workings of the Court of Protection I have felt it to be a sinister body. See what you think when you read this Telegraph article of 28 May 2010 ("A secretive court, which ruled that a cancer sufferer must have treatment against her wishes, can order that mentally ill patients are sterilised, undergo abortions or have life-support switched off") and view this YouTube feature. When what goes on in a court is shrouded in secrecy, my antennae of suspicion become alerted (as with the Family Courts, thought by many, including myself, to have too much power and precious little accountability).

One of the affected people in tonight's programme has said: "I thought it would be nice not to have to worry about money, that it would be like a bank account with added security. I didn't think for a minute it would be like this. The Court of Protection doesn't provide protection."

It seems to be a nice little earner for lawyers though, doesn't it?

Vitamin D deficiency is associated with risk of cognitive decline in the elderly

A research team from the Peninsula Medical School, University of Exeter, has established the first clear link between vitamin D deficiency and the development of cognitive problems that are a key feature of dementia. Findings from the study led by Dr. David J. Llewellyn are being published in the prestigious journal Archives of Internal Medicine, and are the result of an international collaboration involving researchers from the University of Michigan, the UK Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, the Perugia University Hospital and Medical School in Italy, and the US National Institute on Aging.
Read article at physorg.com

On Radio 4's You and Yours programme today, there was a discussion about a new fundraising advert for cancer research which is causing controversy.

See You and Yours webpage. One of the interviewees was a spokesperson for Cancer Research UK, who was urging listeners to make donations to that charity and claiming that the money donated would do a lot of good. I take leave to doubt that.

On Tuesday, 20 November 2007, the BBC News website carried a report about a File on 4 investigation into cancer research wasting vast amounts of donated money and taxpayers' money on worthless studies.

Extracts from that webpage:

"Millions of pounds of charity donations and taxpayers' money have been wasted on worthless cancer studies, the BBC has learned.

File On 4 has discovered thousands of studies have been invalidated.

It found some scientists have failed to carry out simple and inexpensive checks to ensure they are working with the right forms of human tumour cells."

"Cancer Research UK, which spends £315m a year on research, would not be interviewed for the programme."

It's a pity You and Yours's Julian Worricker did not take the opportunity to bring up Cancer Research's colossal careless squandering of those £millions of cancer charity donations on worthless cancer studies, and to remind listeners of that past, inexcusable waste.

EU's MEPs voted against compulsory GM food labelling

So EU citizens will continue not to know whether they are buying meat or dairy products produced using GM animal feed.
Read article in The Ecologist (UK)

Bread is high in SALT. Cut it down or cut it out if you are overweight.

Whether it's white, brown, wholewheat, wholemeal, granary, multigrain, mixed grain, malted, seeded, rye bread, ciabatta, whether it contains added oats, oatmeal or bran, whether it's a milk loaf or a farmhouse, a bread cake or a bread roll, soft-grain or crusty: - it's high in salt! - And salt/sodium is your enemy if you want to lose excess weight or reduce high blood pressure.

How to lose excess weight safely and easily by eating less salt and salty food. You will feel so much better!

See sodium in food.

Groups vulnerable to salt.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari are being denied water. Why is this inhumanity permitted?

See Christopher Booker's article in the Telegraph.

Most people do not get enough Vitamin D

Most people globally get insufficient Vit D
A health expert has said that more than half of the world’s population gets insufficient vitamin D.
Anthony Norman, a distinguished professor emeritus of biochemistry and biomedical sciences and an international expert on vitamin D, notes that half the people in North America and Western Europe get insufficient amounts of vitamin D. "Elsewhere, it is worse given that two-thirds of the people are vitamin D-insufficient or deficient. It is clear that merely eating vitamin D-rich foods is not adequate to solve the problem for most adults," said Norman.
Read article in The Times of India

Low vitamin D levels linked to metabolic syndrome in older people

Insufficient and deficient levels of vitamin D may increase the risk of metabolic syndrome by about 40 percent, according to new findings.
Read article at nutraingredients-usa.com

Is the perfume you use harming you? harming your children? harming other people who come near to you?

See Dr Mercola's article about the Fragrance Industry.

Drinking a lot of Coca-Cola can cause serious muscle weakness because of loss of potassium from the body

See Potassium. But if you've got a lot of cans/bottles of Coca-Cola, cheer up: it makes a good drain cleaner and toilet cleaner, apparently: check it out on the internet...(o:

Researchers wrongly conclude that cutting down on meat will result in weight loss.

It's remarkable how often researchers draw false conclusions from accurate data. In this BBC News item we read that a study of "almost 400,000 adults found that eating meat was linked with weight gain, even in people taking in the same number of calories.

The strongest association was found with processed meat, such as sausages and ham, the Imperial College London team reported."

But instead of adopting the scientific approach and investigating why the processing of meat, such as sausages and ham, was so significant, they have decided that their research "counters the theory that diets with high amounts of protein and low amounts of carbohydrate promote weight loss." - What nonsense! What arrant nonsense! Research is a waste of time and expense when such an illogical conclusion is drawn! - They also failed to follow the clue about the calories to its logical conclusion.

I suggest that they investigate the significance of salt/sodium intake on weight gain. It's high time somebody did! (High sodium content is the main difference between processed meat and fresh meat.)

How to lose excess weight safely and easily without bothering about calories at all.

See sodium in food.

Groups vulnerable to salt.

Study suggests use of cleaning sprays, air fresheners and mould removers may increase risk of breast cancer

Based on retrospective self-reporting of use of household cleaning chemicals, higher use appeared to be linked to the doubling of breast cancer risk. Many such products contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to breast cancer in laboratory experiments on rodents. Read article in the Independent.

Johnson and Johnson in trouble over less than satisfactory FDA inspection findings

"Johnson & Johnson, already under fire from the government over deplorable conditions at a Pennsylvania plant that makes children's pain and cold drugs, is now being cited for problems at another one of its drugmaking plants in the state." - See article on CNNMoney.com.

NHS Complaints Procedures are exercises in futility and exhaustion for complainants

Here is a website dedicated to exposing the NHS Complaints Procedures as exercises in futility and exhaustion for patients and their families seeking to get something done about negligence in the NHS.

Read about my own experience of the NHS Complaints Procedures in my Mensa article on Cruelty, Clinical Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS

The uploading of the Summary Care Records should be stopped immediately because of high proportion of errors

See Telegraph article. "GP leaders in Birmingham told Pulse magazine that the organisation running the system, Connecting for Health, knows about the error rate and has not taken action.

Dr Robert Morley, executive secretary of Birmingham Local Medical Committee, which represents local doctors, told Pulse: "The fact that in Birmingham 80,000 patients have had their records uploaded, the majority without their consent, and one in ten have been put at risk from inaccurate data, shows we believe that the uploading of the Summary Care Record has to be stopped immediately because they are not safe.""

We should pay heed to the words of Katherine Murphy, Director of the Patients Association

In this Telegraph article we read that "Two of the bosses of the company at the centre of the out-of-hours GP scandal have gone on to other jobs running similar patient services for the NHS." These two bosses are GPs. You will remember that Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Ill-Health, who infamously refuses to ban the addition of transfats to food products, despite NICE's recommendation to do so and save up to 7,000 premature deaths a year, is planning to put £billions into the money-grubbing hands of entrepreneurial doctors like this pair.

Extract from the article:

"Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: "It never ceases to amaze me that people can move from one senior post to another without having to justify their failures or be held to account.

"It is appalling that these individuals are involved in out-of-hours again. Where is the accountability and what message does that send to patients and the taxpayer?"

She added that it 'raises many issues' about the government's NHS reforms and plans to put GPs in charge of commissioning care.

Ms Murphy said: "I wonder if the Secretary of State [is] reconsidering some of his plans for GP commissioning now.""

Prosthetic face for gunshot survivor is an amazing surgical achievement

See Telegraph article. You have to admire the incredible skill of the surgeons who have transformed the looks of this woman who had had "a huge hole in her face where her eyes and nose used to be."

London restaurant chain now puts calorie information on its menus.

Read the article in the Telegraph. It seems a pity to me to go to the trouble and expense of providing this information, because counting calories and cutting down on calories is not a good way to try to lose excess weight. It doesn't work and it can harm your health if you eat insufficient calories for your body's needs.

The most effective, safe and fastest way to lose excess weight is seriously to cut down on salt and salty food. Now, if restaurants would provide information about the salt/sodium content of the meals they serve that really would be useful...(o: - Better still, if they would reduce the salt content of their meals...

Lose weight by eating less salt! - Go on! Try it! - You will feel so much better.

Obesity could shorten your life by eight years, study suggests

See LiveScience article. And of course there are the many health problems that you could suffer too because of the obesity.

Obesity is caused by people being given misleading information about the causes of obesity and how to avoid/reduce it. For example, only a small proportion of people know that the easiest and safest way to lose a lot of excess weight is to cut down on salt and salty food. This reduces fluid retention in the body, and is a really fast, effective way of losing weight because the excess fluid being carried about consists of salt and water, and as you know, water is heavy. Cutting down on your salt/sodium intake results in you excreting more urine, and so you lose weight and your blood pressure goes down and there are many other desirable health benefits from this simple, cost-free, drug-free alteration to the food you eat. - And it involves no hunger and no counting calories...(o:

How to lose excess weight safely and easily without bothering about calories at all.

See sodium in food.

Groups vulnerable to salt.

Chemo drugs are harming, causing cancer to, and killing some of the healthcare workers who handle them.

See this article.

Most bags of crisps are about twice as large as they used to be, despite manufacturers pledging to reduce their size.

See the Telegraph article. You certainly can't accuse snack food manufacturers of falling over themselves to make their products less unhealthy, especially the salty snack brigade. But they do provide us with a free laugh or two, e.g. "PepsiCo, who make Walkers and Doritos crisps, announced a major commitment to healthy living in March, saying they would scrap the 40g and 50g ‘grab bag’ of crisps by 2015." - Only 5 years to wait...(o: - How many children's lives have they damaged with their salt-laden junk? And how many more will suffer in order to swell PepsiCo's profits?

Andrew Lansley, the UK Secretary of State against Health and for Food Inc, favours a “non-regulatory approach” to tackle obesity. Personally, I favour a change of job for Andrew Lansley.

Children need to be protected from salt and salty food. See Children and Salt.

Do you want to stop smoking?

Do you want to stop smoking? A friend of mine had been a regular smoker for more than 20 years but has now been a non-smoker for 2 years. She said she couldn't have managed to give up without the help of the website http://whyquit.com/ She sat and read page after page of the website. She says, "It is not pretty and the stories are heartbreaking but it will reinforce the fear that most smokers have when each time they light up and if it helps more people stop then that is a good thing."

Criticism mounts on GSK re Avandia, its diabetes drug widely regarded as unsafe

See the Telegraph article. Incredibly Glaxo's response has been, ""Since 2007 we have seen results from six controlled clinical trials looking at the cardiovascular safety of Avandia. Together they show that this medicine does not increase the overall risk of heart attack, stroke or death."" - And the band played believe it if you like...

Glaxo playing the wide-eyed innocent sits oddly with the ghastly history of the usage of this drug, and the tactics, including intimidation, GSK have employed to try to suppress the facts about its adverse effects. You can read some of that history here: http://wildeaboutobesity.blogspot.com/search/label/Avandia.

Research finds yet again that obesity is not caused by inactivity.

Read about it in this BBC News item. But you can be sure that the fact that obesity is not caused by inactivity will not stop people, including many 'obesity experts', from continuing to urge overweight/obese people to take more exercise in order to lose weight, or to combine exercise with dieting. They are not interested in evidence or in facts. They have been conditioned to believe, despite lack of supporting evidence, that obesity is caused by a surfeit of calories. They believe that the marvellously complex human body and the multitude of many-faceted problems caused by obesity, can be explained by a bit of arithmetic about calories in and calories out. - Beware these simpletons! They are never sated. - If you don't do as they say (i.e. eat less and move more), you are lazy and greedy. If you do do as they say and it doesn't work (because it doesn't work!) then they will tell you you are a liar, or you did it wrong. They are themselves too lazy to read the research evidence.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

How to lose excess weight safely and easily without bothering about calories at all.

Child Obesity.

Lindsey Davies, new president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, is calling for urgent action to reduce salt and transfat content in food

See Denis Campbell's article in the Guardian. It's good that Lindsey Davies is speaking so unambiguously. "The food industry should be about producing food, and food is a basic requirement of a healthy, productive life and wellbeing. Adding things to food that reduce health and wellbeing, such as transfats or too much salt, strikes me as profoundly irresponsible," is clear. The powers that be should have been saying this long ago. The dangers of high sodium intake have long been known but not acted upon.

Both Labour and Tory administrations allowed the food companies free rein to ladle more and more salt into their products, thus damaging irrevocably the health of innocent salt-sensitive purchasers. Let's look at what successive governments with their successive Department of Health personnel have done about recommendations made in regard to salt, high consumption of which is the cause of a huge proportion of the ill-health and disability of the nation:

The Department of Health's Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (COMA) was disbanded in March 2000.

The following information was taken on July 11th 2006 from http://www.actiononsalt.org.uk/recommendations.htm but since then appears to have been removed from the internet. I find it surprising that such interesting information has been removed. It's a good job I copied and pasted it when I did. The website itself http://www.actiononsalt.org.uk/ is still on the internet.

Recommendations made about salt

"COMA

1 Nutritional Aspects of Cardiovascular Disease 1994 This COMA report considered the evidence for a causal relationship between the consumption of sodium and both the level of blood pressure and the rise in blood pressure with age. A statement in the report said it recommended: "A reduction in the average intake of common salt (sodium chloride) by the adult population from the current level of about 9g/day to about 6g/day. There needs to be a gradual reduction in the amount of sodium from salt added to processed food and food manufacturers, caterers, and individuals should explore and grasp the opportunity for reducing the sodium content of foods and meals." The Chief Medical Officer at that time, accepted all the recommendations in this COMA report except for the recommendation to reduce salt. The reason for this is not clear but is believed to be pressure from industry. Department of Health (1994), "Nutritional Aspects of Cardiovascular Disease", HMSO, London.

2 Dietary Reference Values 1991 This COMA report considered that: "Current sodium intakes are needlessly high and we caution against any trend towards increased intakes". It set its recommended intake for salt, as with all the other recommended intakes for nutrients, on the basis of the balance of risks and benefits, which might practically be expected to occur. The RNI for a particular population group is defined as the amount of the nutrient that is enough or more than enough for about 97% of the people in this group. The Reference Nutrient Intake (RNI) for sodium for adults was set at 1600 mg/day. This is equivalent to approximately 4g of salt, if all the sodium was present in the diet as sodium chloride. This is considerably less than the present intake of 9-12g. Department of Health (1991), "Dietary Reference values for food, energy and nutrients for the United Kingdom", HMSO, London."

I wonder why The Chief Medical Officer in the early '90s apparently did nothing to implement the recommendation of a maximum of 4g of salt a day, and apparently gave greater consideration to the desires of the food industry than to the health of the nation, and I wonder how many deaths and how much terrible suffering he was, therefore, personally responsible for? And I wonder why his successors in the post were so tardy in taking effective steps to give warnings about salt consumption? - Political considerations? - What though, could be more important in this matter than the health of the members of public - the electorate - the tax-payers, in fact?

I consider the failure to put pressure on food manufacturers and caterers to reduce the sodium content of foods and meals until recent times to be a dereliction of duty of successive political administrations and health departments. - I remember buying McCance and Widdowson's 'Composition of Foods' in the late '90s, at considerable cost, in order to discover how much sodium there was in food. There was no way consumers could get this information from the pack. - The people of this country have been very ill-served in this matter.

See sodium in food.

Obesity and the Salt Connection.

Groups vulnerable to salt.

Puzzled because your weight fluctuates?

The chances are that you are sensitive to salt and suffer from fluid retention/water weight. You may be in one of the vulnerable groups. See here how to lose weight by eating less salt/sodium. And here is the information you need about sodium in food.

Merck To Pay $8M Damages re Fosamax bone deterioration

In replay of a courtroom battle that ended in a mistrial last year, a federal jury voted unanimously that Merck’s Fosamax osteoporosis drug was responsible for causing jawbone deterioration suffered by a Florida woman, who was awarded $8 million in compensatory damages (here is the lawsuit).
Read article at pharmalot.com

Pregnant women in the UK need to take supplements of vitamin D.

Despite some conflicting advice, researchers are recommending pregnant women to take vitamin D supplements because diet and sunshine are providing insufficient levels of the vitamin. Read the BBC News article. "The paper said the UK was the only one of 31 countries examined which did not recommend that women of reproductive age took a vitamin D supplement, and that it also fails to endorse a daily supplement for expectant mothers."

Avoiding vitamin D deficiency brings many health benefits, especially for pregnant mothers and the babies who will be born to them. - Check it out.

Disgraceful under-usage of NHS operating theatres

See the Daily Telegraph article. Orthopaedics is the biggest offender: "In orthopaedics, the biggest specialty, just 45 per cent of "operating time" was spent on surgery, while 33 per cent of time was lost to late starts and decisions to stop work early."

I wonder if this is the explanation for my having to wait in unremitting agony for nearly a fortnight as an in-patient in the Northern General Hospital in 2007 with a very complicated fracture of the right humerus before the urgently-needed replating operation was done? The unconscionable delay caused me irreparable damage and left me in constant severe pain and in continuing need of home care which I would not otherwise have needed.

Excellent article by Alex Renton about toxic trans fats and the harmful products that contain them

See Daily Mail article. It looks as if it's best to avoid transfat-containing Krispy Kremes and Elmlea cream substitute with a bargepole. Don't make yourself ill and be one of the thousands of people who die before their time just for the sake of a doughnut and some artificial cream! - And check out those biscuits!

I urge you to read the article. I'm sure you will find it eye-opening. And then ponder why on earth Andrew Lansley as Health Secretary is against banning trans fats from food! - He should be relieved of his post; he is a laughing stock among people interested in promoting health. He is bringing the government into disrepute. What on earth were they thinking of to appoint him to such a powerful position in which he can do such harm? Were they just 'aving a larf? From his reaction to the Whitewash Report about the UK's Swine Flu Vaccine debâcle, he clearly favours Big Pharma as well as Food Inc...)o: - Please, Mr Prime Minister, can we have a Health Secretary with a bit of interest in keeping citizens healthy, rather than boosting the profits of big business?

Whitewash Review excuses colossal £1.2 Billion wasted on Swine Flu 'Pandemic' that never materialised.

See Daily Mail article. It's strange, isn't it? - Cohorts of Dept of Health lawyers can be marshalled to ensure that patients damaged by medical negligence get the short end of the stick when they try to get help from the system in their predicament, but the lawyers of the drug companies always run rings around the DoH lawyers when it comes to drawing up contracts about vaccines, and ensure that come Hell or high water, Big Pharma rakes in huge profits and the NHS pays for anything that goes wrong.

Andrew Lansley is in the wrong job. He is putting the profits of the Food Industry above the health of UK citizens.

See this Daily Mail article in which you will read that although trans fats are believed to cause 7,000 premature deaths a year, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, opposes a ban on their use as an additive in biscuits, etc - an additive that prolongs the shelf life of the product, but endangers the life of the person who eats it. And this, even though NICE recommends banning trans fats.

This is a Health Secretary who has gone over to the Dark Side. Let's have him out of the Government PDQ. And let's have that ban on trans fats ASAP. Read more about trans fats here: www.tfx.org.uk.