As I gradually lowered my salt/sodium intake, this gradually reduced my excess weight. I lost 50 pounds in 14 months.

As I gradually lowered my salt/sodium intake, this gradually reduced my excess weight. I lost 50 pounds in 14 months. I weighed myself once a week while I was reducing my salt intake. Almost every week I had lost some more weight, though some weeks I stayed at the same weight as the previous week. There was only ONE week that I gained weight during the whole of that 14 month period. It was the week that I was out one day and bought a sandwich from a shop to have for my lunch. That week I gained a pound. (Shop-bought sandwiches are usually high in salt.) - I invite you to read my Mensa article about Obesity and the Salt Connection. And I invite you to try it yourself: lose excess weight by eating less salt and salty food. - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel sooo much better!

EU agencies and conflicts of interest

European Parliament reprimands food advisory body for industry links.
Three European agencies are fighting to rebut charges that they enjoy an overly cosy relationship with companies and interest groups.
Read article on the Nature science journal website

The Queen: her feet look swollen

In this article in the Telegraph today, the photograph of the Queen's feet in patent leather shoes gives the impression that either the Queen is wearing shoes that are too small for her (unlikely) or that her feet must have swollen while she has been wearing them. It seems to me that she is experiencing that common problem of having feet that swell as the day goes on because of excess fluid gravitating downward.

The Queen was not overweight when she was younger, but her four pregnancies were probably a big factor in her developing excess fluid retention. I'll bet she's glad to get out of her court shoes at the end of her busy day and put her feet up!

The Queen's problem of fluid retention and swelling feet would be reduced if she were to cut down on salt/sodium and salty food. - If you too, dear Reader, suffer from swollen feet, I make the same suggestion to you. - You will feel sooo much better!

You do not need to count calories or go hungry to lose weight

Dieting/counting calories/semi-starvation/constant hunger is not necessary to lose excess weight. You will lose weight fast and easily if you cut down on salt and salty food. - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

You can also lose weight easily without hunger by changing to a Low Carb/High Fat (LCHF) way of eating. - Watch this engaging little video about it.

I've been reading The Death of Grass by John Christopher

I've been reading The Death of Grass by John Christopher, which a friend lent/gave me recently. But this is not a book review: just some thoughts about the book.

 

The Death of Grass, a short, apocalyptic novel from the 1950s, posits a dystopian future in which nation states have pressed their farmers to change to an almost worldwide growth crop of 'grass'. The 'grass' in the UK is mainly wheat. The 'grass' in China is, of course, rice. Other countries grow their own national 'grass'. 

 

Monoculture is always a risky undertaking, and so it proves in this novel. When a deadly virus attacks the rice crops in China, and the scientists who had been expected to be able to overcome the problem, gradually find it beyond them, widespread famine/starvation/death results, and once-fertile ground becomes barren. Nearby countries find, courtesy of the wind and other dispersal agents, that their grassy crops become infected too. Eventually the wheat in Britain, where the story is set, becomes contaminated. There is too little other food to feed a nation and everyone has to try to survive as best they can, and by whatever means, abandoning as they must, moralities they previously followed.

 

This book was remarkably prescient. The threat of agrarian monoculture in this century is here already in parts of the world. I read only today in The Ecologist, of the threat to Paraguay's small farmers, "suffering social and environmental ills from the country's meteoric rise in soya farming." I urge you too to read the article and learn how today, in reality and not in fiction, the ruthless agrochemical GM/biotech industry is wreaking havoc on real farmers and on the environment. And I hope that if you do not already oppose the genetic engineering of crops, that you will consider doing so. Everyone's fate may depend on curbing the malign power of Monsanto and the rest of the biotech industry.

Most prescription drugs deplete your body of essential nutrients

Most prescription drugs deplete your body of essential nutrients. Perhaps the most notorious of these widely-prescribed drugs are statins. Quite apart from the patients-reported adverse effects of pain, statins deplete the body of Co-enzyme Q10. Patients who take these drugs should be warned of this and advised to take Co-enzyme Q10 as a supplement. This information should always accompany the prescription. But it doesn't.

 

The many prescribed drugs that cause sodium retention/water retention/fluid retention/weight gain/obesity/water weight deplete the body of calcium, potassium, magnesium and possibly zinc. This means (among other adverse health effects) that the bones get weaker and a fall is much more likely to result in a fracture - and a more complicated fracture. These dangerous drugs include amitriptyline and other tricyclic antidepressants, Epilim and other anti-epilepsy drugs, HRT, steroids including hydrocortisone, prednisone and prednisolone, anti-psychotics and others. Patients taking these drugs should be advised to eat full fat dairy yogurt for its dairy calcium and to reduce their intake of salt and salty food. They should also eat plenty of potassium-rich foods, e.g. vegetables.

 

Diuretics like bendrofluazide/Bendroflumethiazide, which are often prescribed for raised blood pressure, deplete the body of potassium and magnesium. Patients taking these are often advised to eat bananas because of their potassium content.

 

Isoniazid, a drug used to treat tuberculosis, depletes the body of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine). This depletion in turn causes disordered sleep, mainly insomnia. Patients taking isoniazid should be prescribed vitamin B6 to remedy this problem.

 

Beta-blockers such as propranolol can deplete our bodies of melatonin, and insufficient melatonin (one of the hormones in the body) causes loss of sleep. If the physician does not prescribe melatonin to help the patient with this problem, melatonin can be bought without prescription.

 

These are by no means all of the nutritional problems caused by prescription drugs, and of course malnutrition is only one of the host of adverse side-effects of prescribed medications. It is best to consider carefully whether taking prescribed drugs is more likely to do harm than good. For example, statins do most people more harm than good, and anti-depressants work no better than dummy pills, but cause many health problems, including cognitive impairment and memory loss. - You've only got one brain and it is not infinitely elastic to cope with brain-damaging drugs. You've only got one body and you can't trade it in for a new one. In my opinion it's best to avoid all prescription drugs unless they really are necessary, and best to have the lowest effective dose and to take it for the shortest time. The safest medicine is good natural food (not processed food), and the best doctor is good nutrition.

Two simple suggestions that could help to stem the worldwide increase in childhood asthma

A crucial dietary measure that would reduce the incidence and severity of childhood asthma is to avoid feeding children salty meals and snacks. - See this article, where you will read, "According to a new study published in the American Dietetic Association, high-salt foods and snacks are linked to lung changes that trigger asthma symptoms.," and that researchers in Greece found, using questionnaires, "Kids who ate high-salt foods more than three times a week saw their risk of asthma symptoms go up almost five times." 

 

We read in this Telegraph report of research in Rome, Italy, led by Dr Giuseppe Corbo. "The study of 20,000 six and seven-year-olds, published in the medical journal Epidemiology, confirmed a strong link with asthma and obesity, but found that salt was the biggest risk. Those with the highest intake were two and a half times more likely to develop asthma." (my emphasis) See also Salt/Sodium in Foods.

 

Another important precaution is to avoid dosing children with paracetamol/acetaminophen (aka Tylenol and Calpol). There is a wealth of statistical data on that webpage which suggests a link between acetaminophen and childhood asthma.

 

Since AsthmaUK suggested this week that a third of people with asthma are at a high risk of having a potentially fatal asthma attack (see this BBC report), I reckon AsthmaUK ought to do the decent thing and bring these simple precautionary measures to the attention of asthma sufferers and their relatives and carers. Surely it is a moral imperative.

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities

For a new perspective on conflicts of interest with regard to the pharmaceutical industry and health campaigning charities I invite you to put the name of one such charity and the words "pharmaceutical sponsors" into your favourite search engine's searchbox. - I typed

asthma.org.uk pharmaceutical sponsors

into my searchbox and I was led to a page about a publication by The Stationery Office, viz.

The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Fourth Report of Session 2004-05

By Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Health Committee, Health Committee Parliament Great Britain House of Commons.

Whoever the actual people were who wrote this publication, they were clearly aware that the drug industry's sponsorship of charities is not motivated by philanthropy, but by greed, in the hope and expectation of increasing the sales of their drugs, and thereby increasing their profits. You may draw your own conclusions from that, as I do mine. It leads me to conclude that the advice given on the websites and in the literature of some at least of the major health campaigning charities, such as AsthmaUK, DiabetesUK, British Heart Foundation and others, may not really be in the best interests of the patients/sufferers they ostensibly serve. I hold in mind that we are constantly assured that business companies must act in the interests of their share-holders. So if I wanted to help people suffering from asthma, I personally would advise them to cut down on salt and salty food as this would improve their health in many ways. It would reduce excess fluid retention and thereby reduce excess weight, one of the risk factors for asthma, It would reduce high blood pressure if they had high blood pressure. It would reduce breathing problems. - And very importantly, if they had gained a lot of weight from using prescribed steroids for their asthma symptoms, it would speedily reduce that weight gain and the other serious adverse effects of prescribed steroids.(See my webpage about prescribed steroids.) What I would definitely not do is donate to AsthmaUK... - I don't donate to drug company profits.