An old school-friend rang me today and reminded me of a choral part-song we used to sing as girls

Katharine had been to a concert recently and the song had been on the programme. After our plucking at the strings of memory, I felt a desire to see the sheet music of the song again and have a little sing. - What a pleasure therefore to find it available on this website, www.vsmusicsupplies.com, and furthermore to find, on ringing up, that it is a real human being with a warm friendly voice who answers the phone, not a recorded message, not a daunting menu, not a call-centre slave. - Ruth will be dispatching my music on Monday...(o:

The Blue Bird (by Charles Villiers Stanford)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNdeCzrdnpE

Could any voices sound lovelier than these?

What's the best way to prevent asthma, and by extension, prevent deaths from asthma?

Well it was reported in the Telegraph this week that doctors, by way of Dr Dinesh Saralaya, who runs a specialist clinic in Bradford, are saying that 1,000 Asthma deaths a year could be prevented if patients, even those with only mild asthma, would regularly use "their ‘preventer’ inhaler - which contains a low-dose steroid" rather than relying "solely on the ‘reliever’ inhaler when undergoing an attack. " The evidence for this claim appears to be "a poll of 333 people with severe asthma, conducted by Ipsos MORI and funded by drugs firm Novartis". Personally, I would never give much credence to research funded by companies with a financial interest in the results, and in particular to research funded by drug companies hoping to increase the sales and use of their drugs and consequently their company profits. - Would you?

But I have even stronger reasons to regard this report with scepticism. The newspaper report is illustrated with a photo of a child using an inhaler, so I'll consider in particular child sufferers from asthma. - Now I am not a doctor and I have no medical qualifications whatsoever, so if you are wanting a medical opinion you would be better looking elsewhere than on my blog. But like you I do have a brain and I can read. My personal opinion is that the best way to prevent asthma, and to prevent deaths from asthma, is to protect children from a high intake of salt/sodium. My opinion is based on the following research evidence:

In this Telegraph article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2137775/Too-much-television-is-an-asthma-risk.html, about research in Rome, Italy, led by Dr Giuseppe Corbo, despite its misleading title, the crucial finding is, "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 of salt were two and a half times more likely to develop asthma." (My emphasis.) I'll bet your brain comes to the same conclusion as mine does, doesn't it? - Protecting children from a high salt diet is the simplest, safest and most effective way to reduce their risk of developing asthma and also from any necessity to take steroid meds as treatment for asthma. (I'm not a big fan of steroid meds, especially if they can be avoided.)

This article, too, supports the wisdom of a low salt intake for children. "According to a new study published by 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."

Another drug-free and very important measure to protect children from developing asthma is to avoid dosing children with paracetamol/acetaminophen (aka Tylenol and Calpol). A wealth of statistical data on this webpage http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/health/evidence-mounts-linking-acetaminophen-and-asthma.html?_r=1 suggests a link between acetaminophen and childhood asthma. Also have a read of this article from the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3233550/Delaying-baby-vaccine-could-cut-asthma.html for another simple measure that "could halve the likelihood of a child developing asthma by the age of seven."

As well as reducing the suffering of many thousands, even of millions, of people, these simple measures could also save about £1 billion a year - nearly one per cent of the NHS entire NHS budget - that is spent on asthma. - What it would not do, of course, is boost the profits of the drug company, Novartis...

I've been watching BBC2's The Men Who Made Us Fat

I watched Part 1 of The Men Who Made Us Fat on BBC2 last week. I must say it's a refreshing change to have some evidence-supported information about important causes of the dramatic rise in the incidence and severity of obesity and obesity-related ill-health instead of the usual incorrect propaganda.

In Part 1 it was explained how sugar is a major contributor to obesity and how since the second world war the USA's food industry has been ladling sugar, sugar and more sugar, into its processed junk food products, be they sweet or savoury. And another even more-dangerously obesogenic sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is also added to their food junk and their ghastly soft drinks. This corn product use is massively profitable for America's corn farmers and massively damaging to the health and weight of American citizens. - Especially when it is coupled with the ill-conceived (blame Ancel Keys) misinformation that low-fat food is a good way to lose weight (it isn't and it doesn't work) and that low fat intake is good for our health (it isn't).

So those of us who were paying attention learned that although America purports to be a democracy and proclaims, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," these days it's more like, "Government of the people, by the farm industry's political stooges, for the farm industry's profits, and to Hell with the well-being of the 'American people'".

On Thursday night I watched Part 2, in which it was explained that not content with changing America's food to obesogenic mass-manufactured highly-addictive crap, Big Business perverted civilised eating to a fast feeding process, with fast food outlets serving food fast to customers, who ate it fast (it didn't take too much chewing), sloshing it down with over-sweetened soft drinks, having queued for 'counter-service', so much speedier than table service. And furthermore, they increased portion sizes to ludicrous levels. - I found the gargantuan size of the drinks especially horrifying! 

Well America's citizens are now mostly pretty huge - well huge, certainly, but not so pretty... And they are so big that they almost look like another species. - And what does the food industry suggest as a remedy for this gross obesity problem caused in large part by the food industry itself? - Well, blame it on the victims of course! Like rapists used to do. - The victims need to eat less fat and take more exercise! (NOT)

But it is not lack of exercise that causes obesity, so taking more exercise does not and will not reduce obesity. Obesity causes inactivity, not the other way round, as I explain in my Mensa article. And as Professor Terry Wilkin of the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry. explained in Thursday's programme. 

Professor Wilkin led a pioneering study into childhood weight gain and found that children do not gain weight because of inactivity and do not lose weight by taking exercise. The study had been commissioned by the government of the time, but the findings were unwelcome, so they were buried and funding stopped, and successive governments, few among them scientists, chose to heed the falsehoods of the food industry, i.e. cut down on fat, especially saturated fat, and take more exercise! - Oh dear! - Do you think it's too much like America's plight? - Government of the people, by Big Business interests, for the profits of the Food Industry and its mates? - What do you reckon? - We've got the Dept of Health being advised about how to tackle obesity by the food and drinks businesses who promote obesity. - Looks like we're gonna be getting more and more obese with all this crap food and crap advice, doesn't it?

And when are they going to get on to SALT? and anti-depressants? and other prescription drugs that cause weight gain?

Pfizer: Prempro HRT Settlements costly

"Pfizer Inc. (PFE) (PFE), the world’s largest drugmaker (PFE), said in a securities filing that it has paid $896 million to resolve about 60 percent of the cases alleging its menopause drugs caused cancer in women. Pfizer has now settled about 6,000 lawsuits that claim Prempro and other hormone-replacement drugs caused breast cancer, and it has set aside an additional $330 million to resolve the remaining 4,000 suits, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."
Read article at businessweek.com

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrogen

Do you have a lot of unpleasant symptoms of ill-health and keep developing more? And keep getting more and more pills to deal with the new symptoms?

I sometimes look at forums on the internet and in particular those in which forum members write about symptoms or diagnoses they have, and invite other members to suggest a course of action. Mostly other forum members do indeed try to help the OP by suggesting a course of action or by sympathising with the OP because they think they themselves have, or have had, the same problem and know how difficult it is to cope with. 

 

There is usually a strong tendency to suggest what they feel will be acceptable to the OP. Thus if the OP is taking such and such drug for such and such problem, and a second drug for the second problem... and an nth drug for the nth problem, rounded off by an anti-depressant for feeling fed up about it all, then the response might well be to get the GP to send the OP for, say, an X-ray or a CT scan or MRI scan, for this or that or the other in the hope of sorting out the new symptom by giving it a medical name and another pack of pills to tackle it or to 'legitimatise' it.

 

 

My cast of mind would cause me to wonder whether some of the troubling symptoms are caused by the actual drugs themselves, or possibly by the fact that the drugs are adversely reacting with one another. Another thought I would have straight away is to consider ditching the anti-depressant (by gradually reducing the dose) since anti-depressants 'work' no better than dummy pills and have a multitude of serious adverse effects that cause harm both in the present and in the future, to both the body and the brain. Most importantly I'd be concentrating on what has caused all these nasty symptoms - 'cos they sure as Hell weren't caused by lack of pharmaceutical drugs in the body!

 

 

It is increasingly the case, surely, that the unnatural and unhealthy food that the food industry foists on its customers is responsible for a large proportion of the degenerative illnesses those customers suffer from. - "There is no compulsion to buy unhealthy food!" I hear you cry - and you are right. I agree with you. - But like the magic food of the wicked witches and goblins in some fairy stories, modern convenience foods are highly addictive. Junk foods create junk food junkies, enslaved by their food cravings.

 

 

If a daring forum member were to suggest a change of diet - cutting down on salt or sugar perhaps, eating fresh food, home-cooked, much more often than ready-cooked crap from the supermarket, drinking water rather than highly addictive fizzy drinks, one of which drinks can be used as a pretty effective toilet-cleaner! - I don't think that answer would go down too well. Gosh no. - Health is nothing to do with food and nutrition, you know...(o: - Ill-health is caused by magic and must be treated by magical drugs - even if they don't work and require another drug to remedy their side-effects!

Big Pharma has been given a license to defraud Texas patients

"The Texas Supreme Court has given Big Pharma a license to defraud Texas patients. In a unanimous ruling that ignores the decision of a local jury and overturns a lower appellate court, the Supreme Court ruled that big drug companies have no responsibility to directly warn patients about the dangers of powerful pharmaceuticals. With doctors and nursing homes already shielded from accountability, this decision completes the medical industry trifecta of immunity by adding drug makers to the list. The decision is not surprisingly being hailed by pharmaceutical conglomerates, medical industry lobbyists, and other special interests."
Read article at texaswatch.org (USA)

I watched the final episode of 'Silk' tonight on BBC1

I watched the final episode of 'Silk' tonight on BBC1 and it was as compulsive viewing as I have found all the previous episodes. We were given this evening another glimpse into the amoral, corrupt world of a powerful Mafia-type criminal. We saw and listened to some  'professional' also-rans in the criminal world - a bent copper, a repellent, ruthless solicitor - and Billy, the Senior Clerk of the Law Chambers where Martha works. Martha, the incorruptible, astonishingly bright barrister has been defending the drug-dealer Mafia guy, who in this particular instance, Martha discovered to have been set up by the police. Billy, superbly played by Neil Stuke, is a morally dubious character we rather like, we viewers of 'Silk'. - We like so many of the characters and the actors who play them. We like the complexity of the plots and sub-plots woven into this Silken masterpiece, though our favourite, of course, is Martha (played by Maxine Peake).

Martha used her courageous wits tonight to battle against veiled and unveiled threats and bullying, to winnow out the truth from the lies of the baddies, won her case and kept her integrity unsullied. Billy, fighting a lonely battle with a recent frightening diagnosis of cancer, uses his sharpened awareness of his mortality to tell the Court that he has been bribed, repeatedly, by the solicitor for the defendant.

In the present moral climate we are constantly invited to regard morality as relative, to excuse our wrongdoing, whether small or large, by the assertion that everyone else does it, or would do it, given the opportunity. But this is not the case, is it? - Early in the day or late, we can change our path. There is no compulsion to keep on doing wrong, just because we think we are safe from being found out. - We can choose truth.

It's surprising how even your arms swell and can become painful when you are inappropriately or excessively dosed with Premarin or other oestrogen-containing drugs, including some birth control meds or HRT

It's surprising how even your arms swell and can become painful when you are inappropriately or excessively dosed with Premarin or other oestrogen-containing drugs, including some birth control meds or HRT.

Read of my own experience in this matter and of how I found a simple drug-free way to lessen the harm done. It's best to avoid pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can. Just because they are prescribed for you, it doesn't mean that they are safe. Your doctor may not be well-informed about their side-effects, and the drug companies are notorious for down-playing harmful effects or keeping them secret for as long as they can. Big Pharma is/are frequently in the criminal courts for this and other misdemeanours. See this page also - especially if you did not know that oestrogen is a steroid.

I went for an eye test today and was told I now have tiny cataracts

I went for my biennial eye test today and was informed that I don't need new glasses but that I now have a tiny cataract in each eye. Cataracts are one of the many adverse side-effects that can result from taking prescribed steroids. I am a steroid victim and I am confident that the steroid medication I took for many years is the main reason I now have these very small cataracts. 

I'm not at all worried about this development because I am confident that my long avoidance of added salt and salty food, and my present low carbohydrate/high fat way of eating (sometimes called a ketogenic diet) will greatly reduce the likelihood of the cataracts growing to become big problems.

Update: 5th July 2014. Sadly I was mistaken in what I stated in my second paragraph. My confidence was misplaced. The cataracts are now much bigger and are making it much more difficult for me to see clearly. The optometrist told me yesterday that they will inevitably continue to grow.

Children's meals in some pubs and fast food chains remain far too high in salt

The Independent reports on new survey findings by CASH (Consensus Action on Salt and Health). "Children's meals at some of the UK's leading pub and fast food chains contain more salt than they should eat in an entire day, a study has found." Perhaps surprisingly, "Nando's and Wetherspoons both had children's meals containing three times as much salt as a McDonald's Happy Meal of a hamburger and fries. " I recommend that parents read the whole article.

There are healthier options available, but parents are hampered if they are looking for the healthier low salt options for their children because menus lack nutritional information. - Even now! - After years of warnings about the harm that high salt intake does to children and the dangers to their long-term health when they become addicted to salt in childhood. - Even now! - Even now parts of the Food Industry are continuing to ladle vast amounts of salt into children's meals, without providing the necessary information that these levels of salt are dangerous to health. - Heightened risk of high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke, heart disease, osteoporosis, asthma and kidney disease: these are the free accompaniments to highly salted children's meals...

Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes and Dangerous Medications

 

When you are first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes doctors will recommend you begin exercising and eating healthier foods. That’s the first prescription the medical community turns to before medication.

 

Why does being overweight contribute to type 2 diabetes? More than 85 percent of people who have type 2 are obese. There is definitely a connection, but scientists are still uncertain as to what it is. One theory is that having excess weight makes your cells more resistant to insulin. If cells don't absorb insulin, blood sugar levels will rise, causing diabetes.

 

Another study puts forward the theory that fat buildup might essentially be blocking the pancreas from putting out insulin. Fat could also be keeping the liver from absorbing insulin. That study found that as people lose weight, the liver's ability to filter sugar improves and the pancreas produces more insulin.

 

People with type 1 diabetes do not produce insulin. They are mostly limited to insulin in the treatment of their condition. People with type 2 diabetes are in a unique position. They developed the disease later in life, possibly because of obesity. They still produce some insulin, and medication can help to manage their disease.

 

People with type 2 diabetes also make up the majority of diabetes cases — an estimated 95 percent. This makes people with type 2 diabetes a very attractive target for pharmaceutical companies that want to sell diabetes drugs.

 

One of the best-selling medications for type 2 diabetes is Actos, which works by making cells more sensitive to insulin. When cells are more insulin-sensitive, they filter more sugar from the blood. That lowers blood sugar levels.

 

Actos is manufactured by Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The drug has made the company more than $16 billion in the United States alone since 2007. All of this money may have helped to hide dangerous Actos side effects.

Actos has carried a black-box warning since 2007. The Food and Drug Administration only uses this warning on drugs that can cause serious injury or death. Actos got its warning for increasing the risk of congestive heart failure by 30 percent.

 

The drug also drastically increases the risk of Actos bladder cancer. A U.S. study says Actos increases the risk by 40 percent when the pill is taken for more than 12 months. Another study, published in the British Medical Journal, says Actos can actually increase bladder cancer risk by 83 percent.

 

Other type 2 diabetes drugs like metformin and sulfonylureas can have side effects on the kidneys, liver and heart.

 

Patients and doctors should discuss each medication option and then decide together which one is best.

  

 

William Richards researches and writes about prescription drugs and medical devices for Drugwatch.com.

Health Campaigning Charities - creatures of the Drug Industry?

The Pharmaceutical Industry has a malign influence on the big health campaigning charities. I have visited this subject before: see http://wildeaboutobesity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/for-new-perspective-on-conflicts-of.html This corruption has been brought to my attention again because some journalists and other concerned individuals/bodies, e.g. here, have been drawing attention recently to the way big charities have been subverted away from their original charitable aims and objectives. They have become instead bloated, overpaid quangos, largely funded from taxation, serving political aims, campaigning for political objectives and deceiving ordinary citizens into donating their time, money and effort to organisations they would not want to fund if they knew the truth about them.

 

My own particular concern is the big health campaigning charities, which I regard as a front for promoting pharmaceutical drugs and thereby increasing the profits of Big Pharma. If drug promotion benefited people's health, I would not be against it. But that is not the case.

 

When the aim is to get more and more people taking prescription drugs, rather than the aim being to prevent, ameliorate or cure the disease, we are clearly in a dystopian world of lies and corruption, of blighted lives and unnecessary suffering. Although these health charities give a modicum of good advice, it is outweighed by misinformation, drug promotion and failure to draw attention to simple, really useful dietary measures. Here are some examples:

 

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. But AsthmaUK don't tell people about the massive difference salt reduction makes to the incidence and severity of childhood asthma, surely a greater benefit than any drug treatment and with no harmful side-effects or habituation to medications. - My personal opinion is that everyone's health and pocket would benefit if AsthmaUK were to close down.

 

Similarly, Diabetes UK (i.e. www.diabetes.org.uk) gives precisely the wrong dietary advice about diabetes. See this article by Dr Briffa. And this one.

 

And what shall I say about the British Heart Foundation (BHF)? The British Heart Foundation is a charity that states that it aims to prevent people dying from heart diseases. I don't believe that the advice it gives is very likely to succeed in that aim. - To me, the most important preventative measure, and indeed the most important remedial measure with regard to heart problems, is avoiding salt and salty food. This reduces the risk of stroke, high blood pressure, heart attack and heart failure, reduces obesity and reduces breathlessness. It is also helpful to cut down on carbohydrates and eat plenty of healthy fat. (Check out LCHF - Low Carb/High Fat - on your favourite search engine.) - Yet what does the BHF and its spokespeople plug over and over again? - Why statins, of course. It is a drug-oriented website. Its aim does not seem to me to be to prevent people dying from heart diseases. Its aim seems to be to get people to take drugs, especially statins. Statins are controversial, vastly over-prescribed drugs with many adverse side-effects.

 

Did you know that many of the most-prescribed drugs (tricyclic anti-depressants, steroids, antipsychotics, etc.) - by causing sensitivity to salt - can and do actually cause obesity, heart problems and type 2 diabetes, among many other serious degenerative health conditions? And that salt intake is also linked to stomach cancer? And that Paracetamol/Calpol/Tylenol/Acetaminophen (a painkiller) is especially harmful to children? And that there is massive overprescribing of powerful painkillers by UK GPs, leading to addiction and to death by overdose among their unfortunate patients?

 

It seems clear to me that the health campaigning charities should be strongly advising people to reduce salt and sugar intake and cut down or cut out processed food products, since these measures are of enormous benefit to health, particularly with regard to degenerative diseases. And rather than encouraging people to take pharmaceutical drugs that have so many harmful side-effects, often far more harmful than the illness they are being prescribed for, they should be on the side of avoiding drugs unless they are absolutely necessary.

French farmers speaking out about illnesses caused by pesticides

Farmers in France are winning court cases on illnesses caused by the use of pesticides. Long a taboo subject within the farming community, they are speaking increasingly openly about this potentially lethal pollution, says Claire Le Nestour.
Read article at euractiv.com

Average man in the year 2000 over a stone heavier than he was in 1986

Scientists from Oxford University’s British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group have analysed data on body weight along with changes in the amount of food people consumed over the 15-year time period. See physorg.com news item. They found that the average man in the year 2000 is over a stone heavier than he was in 1986. But "Dr Peter Scarborough of the Department of Public Health at Oxford University, who led the research, said: ‘We looked at how much food was available over time, accounting for food that’s wasted or thrown away. It’s clear people are eating more, and today we’re seeing a continued increase in the amount of food available.’"

I don't myself find that Dr Scarborough's conclusion follows from the data. For one thing "the actual observed increase in average male weight of 7.7kg was much more than expected from the extra food available to men in 2000." The researchers then use the usual get-out of ascribing this discrepancy to a reduction in physical activity. - But remember, folks, exercise - even a lot of exercise over a long period - produces little or no weight loss, even though researchers constantly claim that it does. - Exercise is not the answer - not even part of the answer - to the increasing problem of obesity and its attendant ill-health.

For another thing, there is no mention of salt in the article, and yet the fastest, safest and most reliable way to lose excess weight is to reduce salt/sodium intake.

Thirdly, there is no mention of the constantly increasing number of pharmaceutical drugs being prescribed by GPs and other healthcare workers, when weight gain is a very common side-effect of many, or even most, prescribed drugs. These drugs include steroids, HRT, tricyclic antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-epileptics and many more that are frequently over-prescribed and frequently unmonitored. (The weight gain is because of fluid retention resulting from weakened blood vessel walls/ salt sensitivity.)

Fourthly, the research is funded by the BHF, who have as their constant refrain the need for calorie reduction and taking more exercise to lose weight, and yet that is not at all a good, or even a likely, way to lose excess weight. The BHF would be unlikely to publish or give prominence to research findings at variance with their reiterated advice. As likely as politicians on the make being heard telling the truth, I reckon. I am not an admirer of the BHF and its iffy advice and constant plugging of statins, a drug that does more harm than good to most of the people who take it.

So I would favour other factors as more likely reasons for the heavier weight of men. These would include as major causes:
1) taking more prescription drugs and not being told of the need to avoid salt and salty food when taking the ones that cause sodium retention/ fluid retention
2) the irresponsibly high concentrations of salt that food companies add to their processed foods and to their bread
3) dieting - by which I mean eating fewer calories than the individual's body requires and/or expending more energy by way of taking more exercise.
A lesser cause would be the increasing amounts of oestrogen in the drinking water supply because it and other sodium retention-causing compounds are excreted in the urine of women on 'the pill' or on HRT and so enter the water table.

And of course the heavier you are the more calories you need, both to carry your heavier body around and service its organs, and to keep the heavier body warm, since heat lost from a body is proportional to the surface area of the body, and the heavier person tends to have a bigger surface area than the lighter person.

Are you overweight and apple-shaped? You could reduce this problem by reducing salt intake.

Are you overweight and apple-shaped? You could reduce the problem by cutting down on salt and salty food. Everyone who is overweight has a higher than normal blood volume because of excess water/fluid retention, and would benefit from eating less salt/sodium. 

(Steroid victims in particular are at risk of huge weight gain and the dangerous condition of being obese and apple-shaped, because they are so seldom informed that they need seriously to reduce their salt intake while taking the steroid meds.)

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, angina, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!