Pfizer involved in deception over new arthritis painkiller drug Celebrex

"A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs. “They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague. The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing."
Read article in the New York Times (USA)

Really I don't think arthritis painkilling drugs are worth the candle. They've done a great deal of harm over the years. See my posts about Vioxx, for example.

You can reduce the pain of osteoarthritis by the simple expedient of seriously cutting down on salt and salty food. This dietary measure also lowers high blood pressure, reduces your risk of heart attack, stroke, depression, fractures, some cancers and many other degenerative illnesses, as well as reducing excess weight caused by fluid retention and helping with breathing problems. - What's not to like? - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

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?

House of Lords committee finds Nudge Theory for improving health is not good enough

BBC News reports that The House of Lords science and technology committee finds Nudge Theory with regard to improving the nation's health is not good enough, and that legislation is also required. Well I'd certainly go along with that. - The current health nudges/snippets of advice include that increasing exercise levels helps with reducing obesity - but it doesn't! - and that saturated fat causes heart disease - but it doesn't! - and that high cholesterol levels should be treated by taking prescribed statins - although these drugs do most people more harm than good and cost a lot of money.

Another nudge is called voluntary agreement, and that is when the manufacturers of unhealthy food agree to reduce levels of harmful additives/contaminants/poisons in the processed junk/food they inflict on consumers, and then do this reduction by miniscule amounts at the speed of an exhausted snail on tranquillisers. - My especial grouse about this is the continued presence of toxic synthetic transfats in manufactured biscuits, cakes, etc. Adding these factory-produced poisons to food intended for human consumption should be banned by Law, and that Law backed up by criminal sanctions against the CEOs of any companies that continue to add them to their products.

If the continued rise in incidence and severity of obesity that wreaks havoc on the economy and great, unnecessary suffering on huge numbers of individual people, is ever to be stemmed, and, hopefully, reversed, then any nudges/advice given should be supported by reliable evidence that it is correct, and not just the repetition of unproven mantras, assumptions and misinformation.

I read an interesting book review this morning.

I read an interesting book review this morning. The book is called Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America. "Perjury [is] becoming the norm among affluent criminals and threatens legal system, says Pulitzer winner James B. Stewart."

His book tells of how lies and perjury (lying under oath) increasingly feature at the highest levels of business, media, politics, sports and culture, and in particular tells the stories of Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Bernie Madoff and Barry Bonds. I'm feel sure the subject matter would interest most people who follow current affairs, though obviously Americans especially.

Were I to write such a book, it would no doubt be about the damaging lies 'obesity experts' and 'dieting gurus' tell about the causes of and remedies for obesity, and about the many other criminally dangerous lies that have become so prevalent in the Healthcare Industry, the Drug Industry and the Food Industry, and about the politicians, bureaucrats et al who are their creatures, and about how these lies are destroying the health and happiness of billions of innocent people the world over.

Ambulance bosses are spending big money buying bariatric ambulances and equipment to accommodate bigger patients

Ambulance bosses are spending big money buying bariatric ambulances and equipment to accommodate bigger patients, as reported by BBC News. Clearly this is necessary. Ambulance bosses are not in a position to correct the misinformation and professional negligence that destroy so many people's health and happiness. On the BBC webpage carrying the report, there is a short video about Eileen Forde's painful and humiliating experience travelling in a standard ambulance when she weighed 34 stone (476 pounds). If you put that lady's name into your search engine I'm sure you will find, as I did, many vituperative, insulting personal comments about Ms Forde, though I think you'd have a long search to find any of these bullies with the courage to comment using their real name. Mostly Eileen is accused and found 'guilty' of being greedy and eating too much - guilty, Dear Reader, with neither evidence nor proof to support the unjust verdict.

I feel great sympathy for anyone like Eileen, subjected to the jeers of fools - and indeed I am brought close to tears sometimes, like today, at such examples of cruelty and unmerited criticism. Instead of blaming morbidly obese people for eating too many 'pies' and the like, the bullies would be nearer the truth if they blamed the pharmaceutical drugs that are a major cause of morbid obesity. You can read about some of these drugs here and here. The bullies would also be nearer the mark if they heaped blame on the highly-paid doctors who prescribed the drugs despite being so ill-informed about their side-effects that they didn't know they would result in obesity because of weakened blood vessels and massive fluid retention. And they didn't know that these side-effects could be avoided by stressing to their patients/victims the need to avoid added salt/sodium and salty food while taking the potentially harmful medication.

If you're going to hurl abuse, choose the right targets: ill-informed healthcare professionals, uncaring drug manufacturers, food scientists who cram salt and sugar and other harmful additives into the junk 'food' that weighs down the shelves of the supermarkets and weighs down the bodies of their customers.

Firefighters had to knock down bungalow wall to free fat woman to get her to hospital

See the report in the Telegraph. This is so horrifying. Poor Joanne Ettienne is only 45, but has not been able, because of her obesity (she weighs almost 40 stone) to leave her bedroom for 3 years. And this is all because of the dangerously incorrect obesity misinformation that continues to be churned out.

Her skin is vastly overstretched and delicate because of the huge mass it contains, and this, of course, makes it vulnerable to infections and tears and other damage. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the hospital she is in will provide her with the food she needs in order to lose weight, fast, easily and safely. She needs to eat food that, as far as is humanly possible, contains NO ADDED SALT WHATEVER. She would lose several stones in weight rapidly, and would feel so much better and so much more comfortable. Simple diuretics should also be considered.

I do hope they do not put the poor woman onto a saline drip for any length of time for some reason or other. That would probably be the last straw for her poor fragile skin and blood vessels.

She does NOT need to diet. - I expect she's spent/wasted years of her life dieting. But diets don't work.

Obesity is NOT caused by eating too many calories/too much fat and/or taking too little exercise. – No matter how many doctors and other ‘experts’ claim that it is, and that it can be reduced by eating fewer calories and taking more exercise, they are wrong and it is still NOT true. – The hypothesis has never been put to the test scientifically and there is certainly not a shred of valid evidence to back it up.

There is, however, a wealth of evidence to show that it is NOT true. – Millions upon millions of innocent overweight people have tried over decades to reduce their excess weight by eating fewer calories and taking more exercise. – Overwhelmingly they fail to lose weight this way. – They get tired; they feel cold and ill and hungry. – But they do not lose weight (or if they do it is only temporary). – The ‘experts’ then tell them that they have done it wrong; they haven’t tried hard enough or long enough; they are lying; they are mistaken, etc. – The ‘experts’ cannot get their heads around the fact that it is THEY who are wrong; THEY who are lying; THEY who are mistaken…

Obesity is usually caused by fluid retention in people who are sensitive to salt. – It is as simple, and as profoundly complex, as that.

Now – what really causes the fluid retention/salt sensitivity/obesity? – Here are the main causes:

1. Prescription drugs such as tricyclic antidepressants like amitriptyline.

Amitriptyline is also known as Elavil, Tryptanol, Endep, Elatrol, Tryptizol, Trepiline, Laroxyl, and is present in some combination drugs, e.g. Limbitrol is a drug which combines amitriptyline and chlordiazepoxide.

Weight gain is also widely reported by people taking Lexapro, Prozac, Fontex, Celexa and Paxil. These are not tricyclic antidepressants; they are SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors). As with the tricyclic antidepressants, the weight gain is because of sodium retention and fluid/water retention, and can be avoided/reduced by avoiding eating salt and salty food.

2. Other prescription drugs such as steroids including prednisolone (also sold as Pediapred®), prednisone (also sold as Deltasone®, Meticorten, Orasone and SK-Prednisone), cortisone, hydrocortisone, dexamethasone, betamethasone, beclomethasone, fludrocortisone, triamsinolone, desonide, fluprednidene, clobetasone, alclomethasone, momethasone, desoxymethasone, fluosinonide, budesonide, fluosinolone, triamcinolone (trade names Kenalog, Aristocort, Nasacort, Tri-Nasal, Triderm, Azmacort, Trilone, Volon A, Tristoject, Fougera, Tricortone, Triesence) and other corticosteroids, Advair – a combination drug that contains Fluticasone, a corticosteroid, HRT and other medications containing oestrogen – like some birth control medication (contraceptives) – amitriptyline and some other anti-depressants, some anti-psychotic drugs, including Zyprexa (aka olanzapine) and other psychotropic drugs, and some anti-epileptic/anticonvulsant drugs, notably valproate (trade name Epilim).

If you have been inappropriately prescribed or over-dosed with corticosteroids or HRT or the many other drugs that cause weight gain, then you may well have developed drug-induced Cushing’s Syndrome, a very serious illness, frequently far more serious than the health problem for which the drugs were prescribed. It is, to the best of my knowledge, an entirely preventable illness if doctors conform to the protocols for prescribing these drugs and if they monitor patients’ progress on the drugs, and if they warn patients about salt. It is VITALLY important that it be realised that weight gain resulting from these drugs is from sodium and water retention, so patients taking these drugs should be warned not to eat salt, or foods containing salt, while taking the medication. They should also be informed that any weight gained in this way can easily and swiftly be reduced by eating less salt/sodium, and they should be warned not to try to lose weight by eating less food or restricting calories because this will not help them to lose weight and is harmful.

If you gain weight suddenly and unexpectedly when you start to take prescribed medication that I have not mentioned on this page, it is highly likely that the weight gain is caused by the drug. You may like to consider whether you really need to take that drug, or whether the dose could be lowered. At any rate if you continue with the drug, try to reduce your salt intake in order to reduce the weight gain. Doctors seldom, if ever, warn about the drugs that cause salt sensitivity and the need very strictly to avoid salt and salty food while on the drugs, and many do not observe the drug protocols and very few properly monitor the patient’s progress on the drugs. Obviously if doctors did do all these things, there would be no steroid victims, no patients with drug-induced obesity, etc. whereas there are many millions of them worldwide, victims of medical negligence and ignorance.

3. If, as a baby or small child, you ate salt and salty food, you were highly likely to have developed sensitivity to salt and you therefore became fat or overweight.

4. Pregnancy can cause fluid retention/salt sensitivity because of hormonal changes during pregnancy. It is important to avoid salt and salty food during pregnancy.

These are the main causes of obesity. Dieting/calorie counting makes obesity worse and should be avoided.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, boost your lung function and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it!

See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Sodium in foods

I can be contacted from my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Misleading Weight Loss Advice from Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University

See esciencenews.com article, where you will read: ""In the midst of America's obesity epidemic, physicians frequently advise their patients to reduce the number of calories they are consuming on a daily basis. This research shows that simply dieting will not likely cause substantial weight loss. Instead, diet and exercise must be combined to achieve this goal," explained Judy Cameron Ph.D., a senior scientist at OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center, and a professor of behavioral neuroscience and obstetrics & gynecology in the OHSU School of Medicine, as well as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh."

Actually, neither dieting nor exercise is necessary to lose excess weight, nor is it necessary to eat low fat food, because obesity in human beings is caused by salt sensitivity, not by eating high fat food or too many calories or by taking insufficient exercise.

Experts must stop giving the wrong advice. Their misinformation is damaging the lives, health and happiness of millions of innocent people, most poignantly, children.

Obesity is NOT caused by eating too many calories/too much fat and/or taking too little exercise. – No matter how many doctors and other ‘experts’ claim that it is, and that it can be reduced by eating fewer calories and taking more exercise, they are wrong and it is still NOT true.

Obesity is caused by fluid retention in people who are sensitive to salt. – It is as simple, and as profoundly complex, as that.

Now – what really causes the fluid retention/salt sensitivity/obesity? – Here are the main causes:

1. Prescription drugs such as tricyclic antidepressants like amitriptyline.

Weight gain is also widely reported by people taking SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors). As with the tricyclic antidepressants, the weight gain is because of sodium retention and fluid/water retention, and can be avoided/reduced by avoiding eating salt and salty food.

2. Other prescription drugs such as steroids including prednisolone, prednisone, cortisone, hydrocortisone, HRT and other medications containing oestrogen – like some birth control medication (contraceptives) – some anti-psychotic drugs, including Zyprexa (aka olanzapine) and other psychotropic drugs, and some anti-epileptic/anticonvulsant drugs, notably valproate (trade name Epilim).

If you have been inappropriately prescribed or over-dosed with corticosteroids or HRT or the any of the many other drugs that cause weight gain, then you may well have developed drug-induced Cushing’s Syndrome, a very serious illness, frequently far more serious than the health problem for which the drugs were prescribed. It is, to the best of my knowledge, an entirely preventable illness if doctors conform to the protocols for prescribing these drugs and if they monitor patients’ progress on the drugs, and if they warn patients about salt. It is VITALLY important that it be realised that weight gain resulting from these drugs is from sodium and water retention, so patients taking these drugs should be warned not to eat salt, or foods containing salt, while taking the medication. They should also be informed that any weight gained in this way can easily and swiftly be reduced by eating less salt/sodium, and they should be warned not to try to lose weight by eating less food or restricting calories because this will not help them to lose weight and is harmful.

If you gain weight suddenly and unexpectedly when you start to take prescribed medication, it is highly likely that the weight gain is caused by the drug. You may like to consider whether you really need to take that drug, or whether the dose could be lowered. At any rate if you continue with the drug, try to reduce your salt intake in order to reduce the weight gain. Doctors seldom, if ever, warn about the drugs that cause salt sensitivity and the need very strictly to avoid salt and salty food while on the drugs, and many do not observe the drug protocols and very few properly monitor the patient’s progress on the drugs. Obviously if doctors did do all these things, there would be no steroid victims, no patients with drug-induced obesity, etc. whereas there are many millions of them worldwide, victims of medical negligence and ignorance.

3. If, as a baby or small child, you ate salt and salty food, you were highly likely to have developed sensitivity to salt and you therefore became fat or overweight.

4. Pregnancy can cause fluid retention/salt sensitivity because of hormonal changes during pregnancy. It is important to avoid salt and salty food during pregnancy.

These are the main causes of obesity. Dieting/calorie counting makes obesity worse and should be avoided.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, boost your lung function and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it!

See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Sodium in foods

Fat retention and fat excretion: the importance of getting enough calcium.

I can be contacted from my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

More children are suffering from EXTREME obesity

See Los Angeles Times blog report.

This tragic state of affairs obtains because members of the public continue to receive the wrong information and advice about obesity, and in particular, about child obesity.

When children become fat it is essentially because they are eating salty food. Children are especially vulnerable to salt because of their small size and small blood volume, and because their blood vessels are weaker than those of adults. Salt, and the water it attracts to it, can more easily distend weak blood vessels than fully mature ones. The resulting increase in blood volume and other fluid retention results in weight gain, as well as higher blood pressure and many other undesirable consequences. The smaller the child, the less salt they should have - and a baby, of course, should have no salt at all. - Babies can die if they are fed salty food.

Because children have much smaller bodies than adults it would be best if they had no more than half as much salt as adults. Most children, however, have much more than this because they eat so many snacks and instant foods. Just one cheeseburger, for instance, contains almost double the recommended daily salt maximum for children. There are high amounts of salt in packet soups, instant noodles, ketchup and sauces, sausages, burgers and savoury snacks. Fat children will lose weight fast if they eat less salt. And even faster still if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and unsalted vegetables, because these are rich in potassium, which helps to displace sodium from the body. Overweight children should not be put on a diet; dieting is harmful and unnecessary and does not usually result in weight loss. Once children start dieting it is often the beginning of a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and increasing weight and ill-health.

Unfortunately bread contains a lot of salt and most families eat quite a lot of bread because of using it for sandwiches in packed lunches, and for toast, etc. Because of its high salt content bread is not a healthy food for little children or for anyone who is overweight. Some bread manufacturers have lowered the salt content of certain loaves, but most bread still usually contains 0.5g or more of sodium per 100g. This is too much. - Always check on the packet; look for the lowest sodium content.

Cheese is often recommended as being good for children because it contains calcium, but cheese is not really good for children because it has a high salt content. So don't give them a lot of it. Children can get plenty of calcium by drinking milk and by eating yogurt (but avoid the sort of yogurt that has lots of chemical additives).

See Children and Obesity

And see Sodium in foods

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Lose weight

vulnerable groups

FAT RETENTION

Jane Akre's blogpage about Medical Negligence is well worth reading

I recommend Jane Akre's webpage: Five Myths about Medical Negligence as a welcome antidote to the misinformation commonly promulgated by powerful interested parties.

This article by the British medical doctor, James LeFanu, in the Telegraph, adds ballast to the subject matter: Arrogant Doctors.

Art, Politics and Polemic in the Pursuit of Justice and Truth

I should like in this essay to consider the difficulties of the writer holding strong political or other disputatious views and wanting to further them by means of his/her writing.

Propaganda versus Literature? Do they militate against each other? This was constantly asked of the 1930s poets: Spender, Day Lewis, Auden to some extent. (Some Art, surely, was the direct offspring of philosophical commitment, viz. the plays of the great religious festivals of ancient Greece from where the word ‘drama’ originates.) In the mid-19th century, Wesker’s plays attracted criticism as being too overtly propagandist. Certainly The Kitchen could be seen as a powerful argument against nuclear arms; but it was also an entertaining play with accurately observed social commentary. And I remember many years ago seeing Roots at the Sheffield Playhouse and being profoundly moved by Beattie’s discovery of herself, without at that time seeing it as a political play or knowing that it was part of a more political trilogy, or being aware of ‘the personal is political’ as an idea.

Writing that is expressly written with a propagandist intent is not, then, necessarily inferior as art though, of course, if the message is too crudely emphasised or the work itself merely a vehicle for the message, it will be flawed. One has only to think of the many, no doubt apocryphal, works of the kind: Joyfully Serving the State on a Collective Farm, worthy in aim but devoid of intrinsic interest or artistic merit. Certainly there are many novels successful as literature as well as polemical in intention.

The writer has problems of weighting in a particular direction. Will this damage his art? Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was dogmatic in both tone and message, written by a convinced Christian, but this has not stopped it from becoming one of the most popular books ever written. While Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, of the 1950s, with its sombre, modern lack of belief in a loving God or a redemptive Saviour, is uproariously funny both to watch and to hear. In Bunyan’s book, the characters and the story-line hold our interest. In Beckett’s play there are visual comedy, witty dialogue and, constantly, the unexpected. It is perhaps only when the play has ended that we shudder at the bleakness of the godless vision, these shudders in turn being mediated by Beckett’s recurrent showing forth of human courage in the face of terrible adversity. Deliberate shaping has not damaged these two works. On the contrary.

Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe decide on a novel (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) as the form for her anti-slavery message? Here was a new society. The novel form arose with the new bourgoisie under modern capitalism. The middle class, who read novels, were a progressive, literate and broadening band. Many would have already read reformist ideas in Richardson’s Pamela, in Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and in Godwin, the political reformer.

Writing in English was writing for the English-speaking/reading world and not just for America. Reformist zeal in Britain would be ready for Stowe’s message, and these zealots were the literate people who read novels. Many novels at that time were long, and in a long work the arguments could be fully expounded and all facets considered. It could be said that at that time ‘all’ novels had a moral message. Stowe’s had a wider, corporate, moral message.

Let us consider other forms available. Stowe had too much material really for a poem. What about a speech? Well, speeches are transitory and may well be given to an already prejudiced audience, and again, the speech would have to be dauntingly long for both speaker and hearers if it were to cover all the ground Stowe had to cover. A sermon would be heard by only a few and very probably an antipathetic few. Initially antipathetic readers of a novel may have their sympathies engaged as they are drawn into the story and identify with the emotions, thoughts and experiences of the characters.

What about a play? A play can certainly move its audience, although its effects may be more transitory than those of a novel. A play today could reach a huge audience on television but in those days it would reach comparatively few in the theatre. A novel had the potential to reach many. There is also a closer communion between reader and novel than there is between audience and play. The novelist creates a world for the reader who lives in a different world. The novel could be like a social documentary showing different points of view sympathetically (or unsympathetically, if the writer wanted to weight the scales).

I am not a gifted playwright or an outstanding novelist. I am not a powerful politician or an influential journalist or broadcaster. But I am, I reckon, an ardent polemicist and seeker after truth, justice, reform, and the prevention and alleviation of avoidable suffering. I seek in this blog, and on my website, to engage your interest and hopefully to move you to concern about the harm done by scandalously over-prescribed pharmaceutical drugs with poorly-understood, and often unacknowledged, adverse effects, by processed salt-laden, nutrition-deficient snacks and ready meals manufactured by a profit-driven food industry reckless of the damage to the health of their customers, and by dieting, and by medical doctors, too eager to prescribe more and more potentially harmful powerful drugs. The greatest scandal of all being the catastrophically wrong beliefs about the causes of obesity and the best ways to prevent or to reduce it being promulgated by the obesity and dieting ‘experts’. I hope you will consider helping me in my mission in whatever way you can.

Margaret Wilde © 2009

Incidence of Obesity Continues to Rise in the US.

BBC News reports ever more widespread obesity in the United States, where the "economic crisis is partly blamed for rising obesity rates."

As in the UK and the rest of the developed world, obesity will continue to increase both in incidence and in severity until the truth is told about its causes and the best ways to prevent it and to reduce it. The current misinformation, widely and loudly iterated by obesity 'experts', the medical profession and the dieting industry, is fuelling this near-global health crisis.

Obesity is not caused by overeating; it is caused by salt sensitivity/fluid retention in vulnerable people. These include children. - See Vulnerable groups

When people whose blood vessels are weaker than the norm eat salt, the result is weight gain and obesity (because of excess sodium and water held in the blood vessels and elsewhere). This condition is also known as sodium retention, water retention, fluid retention, salt sensitivity or oedema. If these people reduce their salt intake they lose some of the excess sodium and water, and so lose weight, and if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables they lose weight faster, because the potassium in the fruit and vegetables displaces some of the excess sodium from the body.

Prescription drugs including steroids, many antidepressants, anti-psychotics and epilepsy drugs as well as other pharmaceuticals, are a major cause of fluid retention/obesity and especially of morbid obesity. For the sake of your health it would be best to avoid prescribed medication, unless it is absolutely necessary.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations.

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Susan Greenfield on Radio 5: Simon Mayo Programme

I've been listening this afternoon to Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford University professor, on Simon Mayo's Radio 5 programme. And that means I've just heard her give wrong information about what causes obesity. And that's a great shame, because she's known as a scientist and she's very influential.

I went to a talk she gave about ten years ago and I made a point of speaking to her afterwards and showed her photos of me from 1997: photos in which I was extremely fat as a consequence of taking prescribed HRT. She could see that I had lost a great deal of weight (51 pounds, in fact) since then and was surprised to learn that I had done this by drastically reducing my sodium intake, not by dieting.

She was in a bit of a rush and asked me to write to her as she was very interested. This I did, writing to her at the Royal Institution, in her capacity as Director there. I explained that blood volume increased markedly with obesity. We exchanged a few letters but the correspondence was disappointing to me, as I had hoped she would pursue the matter of sodium retention and water retention as causing obesity, rather than overeating, and sodium reduction for reducing excess weight, rather than eating fewer calories or less fat.

I gained from that correspondence the very strong impression that she was reluctant to consider prescription drugs and the medical profession and misinformation from them as blameworthy in regard to people becoming obese. I believe she was reluctant to criticise medics.

The statement of purpose of the Royal Institution when it started in 1799 was: "The application of science to the common purposes of life." As such, clearing up the misinformation and spreading the truth about obesity and how it can best be prevented/reduced would admirably accord with that purpose.

Sadly, Baroness Greenfield gave the same misinformation today that we commonly hear, as she spoke of eating too much being the cause of overweight. - It isn't, and there is no evidence to support her assertion. - I'm very surprised that ten years on from our letters she appears to have failed to investigate the connection between obesity and salt sensitivity.

Happily, when I wrote to Professor Sir Richard Doll, then Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, in 2001, he wrote back agreeing with what I had written about obesity problems caused by poor prescribing and indicating that these could be lessened by diuretics and/or eating less salt/sodium, a fact I had already deduced. He wrote that all doctors should know this.

Obesity is not caused by overeating; it is caused by salt sensitivity/fluid retention in vulnerable people. These include children. - See Vulnerable groups

When people whose blood vessels are weaker than the norm eat salt, the result is weight gain and obesity (because of excess sodium and water held in the blood vessels and elsewhere). This condition is also known as sodium retention, water retention, fluid retention, salt sensitivity or oedema. If these people reduce their salt intake they lose some of the excess sodium and water, and so lose weight, and if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables they lose weight faster, because the potassium in the fruit and vegetables displaces some of the excess sodium from the body.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Visitor/s from the British Heart Foundation have been reading my blog and my webpages because of my critical blog entry about them yesterday.

I see I've had someone from the British Heart Foundation visiting the blogpost I made about them yesterday. They've also visited my website. They appear to have spent a lot of time reading my stuff.

Hopefully they will now consider altering the misinformation about obesity on their website.

I've also noticed they don't mention cutting down on salt/sodium in their advice about how to lower high cholesterol on this page http://www.bhf.org.uk/keeping_your_heart_healthy/preventing_heart_disease/cholesterol.aspx, and yet this is probably the most effective dietary adjustment you could make to lower your cholesterol level as it will simultaneously reduce high cholesterol, reduce excess weight, reduce high blood pressure and reduce any fat retention.

Yes, I know they mention lowering salt intake elsewhere on their website, but they do not give it the importance it merits. Indeed they've only been mentioning salt intake at all for a relatively few years, because I certainly remember some years ago visiting one of their charity shops and picking up one of their leaflets there which had no mention whatsoever of salt intake. I decided against donating anything to them as their advice was so flawed.

And this is their page about diabetes - http://www.bhf.org.uk/keeping_your_heart_healthy/preventing_heart_disease/diabetes.aspx - Here again, no mention is made of the importance of low salt intake in preventing type 2 diabetes and managing diabetes.

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free. I am not a doctor or a dietician or a nutritionist. My website does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot warns that the rise of obesity across the world will trigger huge rise in cancer.

Cancer deaths 'to double in next 40 years'
article by David Smith in the Observer

Extract:

Cancer cases are now rising at such a rate in Britain and the rest of the world that the disease poses a threat to humanity comparable to climate change, a leading scientist has warned.

The growing obesity epidemic in industrialised countries will be highlighted this week as a leading cause of cancer in a policy report led by Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London.

About seven million people die from cancer worldwide each year, according to the most recent estimate by the World Cancer Research Fund, expected to rise to more than 10 million by 2020. The estimated number of new cases annually is set to increase from 10 million now to 16 million by 2020. Overall the toll is predicted to double in the next 40 years.

"It's enormous, it's catastrophic," said Marmot, who said the crisis demanded urgent action. "The numbers are just frightening on a global scale. After cardiovascular disease, it's the next highest cause of death in this country."

Just as global warming requires a quick and concerted international response, so Marmot believes that cancer now requires intervention on a similar scale. "With the same sense of urgency that at long last we're now starting to address the climate change agenda, let's address the cancer agenda because we think a large proportion of those cancer deaths are preventable or could be delayed. It's urgent to be taking action now," he said.

Marmot chaired a panel of 23 experts from around the world to make recommendations for the World Cancer Research Fund's Policy and Action for Cancer Prevention report. A report by the same panel in 2007, the biggest undertaken into lifestyle and cancer, found that a third of cancers are caused by diet and lack of exercise. The experts urged people to stay slim and abstain from too much fast food, red meat and preserved meat, such as ham and bacon, as well as alcohol.

The new report, to be published on Thursday, will not dwell on the issue of smoking because the science is now so well established. Instead its focus is on weight gain and obesity, which leads to around 13,000 cancer cases in the UK every year. Marmot said: "When we look at what's happened to obesity levels in this country, it's growing at an alarming rate. Anybody looking at the evidence would say there must be social and economic causes of that. It can't be that 20 million people individually said, 'I'll think I'll get fat.'""

It's scarcely credible that this host of highly-paid 'experts' still haven't twigged or still will not acknowledge that obesity (along with its many attendant illnesses) has in the main been caused both directly and indirectly by misinformation churned out by doctors, nutritionists, government agencies, the dieting industry, et al, and by the reckless overprescribing of pharmaceutical drugs by ill-informed, arrogant, prejudiced doctors.

Obesity will continue inexorably to increase unless and until people are told the truth, namely that it is a problem of fluid retention, not a problem of overeating, and that it can be reduced easily on an individual basis by giving up dieting and instead concentrating on avoiding salt and salty food. - It is vital for the general public however, as opposed to the individual patient, that doctors' monumentally high prescribing of drugs be curbed by law, in order to prevent the nation's health from going to Hell in an accelerating handcart!

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free. The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Eggs have an "insignificant" effect on cholesterol levels, according to scientists, who are now recommending people to eat as many eggs as they like.

You can now go to work on an egg every day, scientists say
from the Daily Telegraph

Extract:

"The research has come as a huge relief to the egg industry, which in recent decades has struggled to persuade people that eggs are a healthy, nutritious food.

Many authorities are still recommending that consumers should not eat more than about three eggs a week – out of date advice that failed to reflect the evidence, the scientists said.

Only last year the advertising watchdog banned an attempt to re-run the classic advert from 1957: Go to Work on an Egg.

The television advert, staring Tony Hancock and penned by the then junior copy writer Fay Weldon, was deemed no longer appropriate on the grounds that eating an egg for breakfast every day is not a "varied diet".

In the mid-1960s, Britons ate an average of about five eggs a week, but health advice helped drive that figure down to less than two in the mid-1990s.

However, in the study published on Tuesday, Juliet Gray and Bruce Griffin of Surrey University said that it was a "myth" that eating lots of eggs increased people's cholesterol level in most instances."

So where are the prominent apologies from the health advisers to the egg farmers?

This is the homepage about British eggs: http://www.britegg.co.uk/

- The health agencies' advice has damaged the egg industry for many years now - and has also damaged ordinary people's health by limiting their intake of eggs, a highly nutritious, versatile and easy to cook food. - Let's keep an eye open for those apologies - though I suspect that they will be as rare as hen's teeth! - I wonder if the egg farmers will be suing the negligent health agencies?

But this is typical. - 'Health experts' give advice prominently and emphatically, yet, as in this case, there wasn't a shred of evidence to support their warnings against more than 2 or 3 eggs a week.

It's the same as their advice that calorie reduction reduces obesity. - IT DOESN'T! - It's sodium reduction that reduces obesity. - And sodium reduction also reduces high cholesterol...(o: - So...

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Millions more people could be put on statins to prevent heart attack experts said as research shows they are more effective than previously thought.

Statins cut risk of death even in healthy people, research finds
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"There have been calls for everyone over the age of 50 to be given drugs to lower the risk of a heart attack but this is controversial as many see it as needlessly medicalising healthy people.

Prof Roger Boyle, national director for heart disease and stroke, said the public was against a blanket approach to prescribe statins to everyone over 50 and so instead GPs will this year begin to assess the risk of a heart attack for all over 40s this year. He said the only constraint to the programme was how fast the assessments could be carried out and 'whether the public will accept the change from being a person to being a patient and taking medication long-term’.

“The research confirms the benefits of statins throughout the stages of heart disease and it is a powerful indicator of the safety of this kind of treatment,” he said."

I am, I STRESS, not a doctor and not medically qualified in any way. I do, however, have a brain and I use it. - To aim for everyone over the age of 50 to be taking statins - drugs with highly unpleasant side-effects for many people - every day for the rest of their lives is dangerous lunacy, calculated to benefit the drug companies and add to the power of the medical profession.

There is a drug-free and COST-FREE way to reduce high cholesterol levels and to reduce heart disease and heart attacks, stroke, high blood pressure and a myriad other degenerative diseases, and this way has no unpleasant side-effects; it is completely safe. - But the advisers to the government and the members of the medical profession who, like me, know the facts about salt sensitivity/fluid retention/obesity, etc, but unlike me, do not have the courage/honesty to tell the truth about it, do not dare to to do what is necessary. - The Food Industry needs to have legal sanctions put on the amount of salt/sodium it adds to its pernicious processed food and ready meals, and the public needs to be told the truth. The aim should be, within a reasonable time-frame, to eliminate added salt completely from most processed food. The Medical Profession needs to have legal curbs put on its ever-growing reckless prescribing of the many drugs that cause salt sensitivity/fluid retention/obesity, etc. The lies/misinformation about the causes of obesity, etc need to be forsworn. They are the main cause of suffering and early death in this country (and in America and some other countries).

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Restaurants, sandwich chains and coffee shops will soon start to display calorie counts on their menus in a misguided attempt to fight UK's obesity.

Restaurants to display calorie counts on menus to help obesity crisis
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"Within the next six months many well known chains, including Pizza Hut and Pret a Manger, will start to prominently display the calorie content of all of its food.

The idea is being pushed by the Food Standards Agency, the Government's food regulator, which wants all outlets from fish and chip shops to Michelin-starred restaurants to give details of what is in their meals.

If it is a success, the FSA is considering going even further by asking restaurants to publish so-called 'traffic light' labels on their menus, which would highlight in red if a dish was too salty, sugary or fatty."

Knowledge of calorie content will not help anyone to become less obese. Providing this information will be just another colossal waste of time and money. - To lose excess weight it is helpful to know the salt/sodium content, not the calories.

Obesity is not caused by eating fat or sugar or too many calories. Nor is it caused by inactivity/laziness. It is caused by weakened veins leading to fluid retention in the bloodstream, i.e. sodium retention and water/fluid retention, and thereby to excess weight/obesity.

The way to reduce/prevent obesity is to avoid salt and salty food, and to avoid prescription drugs as far as possible because these are a major cause of the the blood vessel damage that precedes the salt sensitivity/fluid retention.

Why not help with disseminating the truth? - If you have any friends who are overweight and know from experience that dieting does not work, tell them about my blog or send them a link to my website. - Better still, tell your MP about my website. - I'm afraid my own MP is as much use as a chocolate teapot...)o:

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Today this blog was visited by someone from the British Nutrition Foundation.

Today this blog was visited by someone from the British Nutrition Foundation. I hope that the BNF will soon, therefore, having read it here, start giving the correct information about losing excess weight, instead of the harmful calorie reduction advice/misinformation they currently give.

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods

Why not help with disseminating the truth yourself? - If you have any friends who are overweight and who know from experience that dieting does not work, tell them about my blog or send them a link to my website. - Better still, tell your MP about my website. - I'm afraid my own MP is as much use as a chocolate teapot...)o:

Figures on child obesity, NHS waiting times and house price data are to be investigated after a row about the Home Office's use of knife crime figures

Watchdog to vet figures covering childhood obesity, NHS waiting times and house prices
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"The news comes after the UK Statistics Authority accused the Home Office of making "unsubstantiated" claims and "selective" comparisons that drew "inappropriate" conclusions about knife crime figures.

Yesterday the authority said it had identified 340 sets of official statistics which may have to be judged against a new code of conduct on how the Government presented data.

Twenty sets of figures are judged so important that the authority has launched an immediate investigation into whether they are being presented properly.

They include NHS waiting times between referral by a GP and treatment, accident and emergency waiting times, the official house prices index, statistics on race and the criminal justice system and figures on obesity, physical activity and diet.

Only figures which meet the new code would in future be approved by National Statistics, the official body in charge of releasing Government data.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chairman of the authority, said he hoped judging official figures against the new code - which includes criteria on how figures are presented - will improve trust in official Government data.

He said: "We now have the guiding principles in place against which we will assess official statistics to determine whether they meet the standards necessary to be labelled as National Statistics."

I have a particular interest in the figures on "obesity, physical activity and diet", since for decades official advice and medical advice about the causes of obesity have been incorrect and damaging. We have been told, and we continue to be told, that we should cut down on fat and sugar and eat fewer calories in order to lose weight. We have also been told to take more exercise. - None of these measures will reduce obesity; they are likely, on the contrary, to increase it, as indeed they have been doing for some years now. This is because obesity is not caused by eating too much fat or sugar or too many calories, nor by taking too little exercise. - And there has never been any evidence to back up the advice that has been meted out to us over the years. - Imagine that! - Not a scrap of evidence to back up the misinformation so confidently and so insistently dinned into us! - "Just eat less and exercise more", the patronising mantra has been repeated ad nauseum. - But it doesn't work!

Obesity is not caused by eating fat or sugar or too many calories. Nor is it caused by inactivity/laziness. It is caused by weakened veins leading to fluid retention in the bloodstream, i.e. sodium retention and water/fluid retention, and thereby to excess weight/obesity.

The way to reduce/prevent obesity is to avoid salt and salty food, and to avoid prescription drugs as far as possible because these are a major cause of the the blood vessel damage that precedes the salt sensitivity/fluid retention.

You may wonder why the 'experts' continue relentlessly to give the wrong advice? - Well they may be embarrassed to admit that for decades they have been harming the health and causing avoidable disabilities and early deaths of millions of people - not just their patients - and are hoping that by adding 'cut down on salt' to their fat/sugar/calories/exercise misinformation, somehow the advice about salt will override the cutting down on calories message. - I very much doubt that it will...)o: - They are guessing again, just as they guessed, wrongly, about overeating being the cause of obesity, and were so arrogant that they didn't bother to put their assumption to the test...)o: - Most people have been conditioned pretty well all their lives to believe the falsehood that greed and laziness cause obesity; the message about salt scarcely impinges on the unfortunate overweight people. They are too busy damaging their health and destroying their lives and happiness by constantly trying unsuccessfully to lose weight by eating less (i.e. going hungry) and exercising (becoming exhausted).

Well it may be embarrassment by the professionals - or it may be fear of being sued - or worse - for causing the ill-health and early deaths they have caused and are causing!

Maybe they cling to the hope that the truth will not become clear until after they die... - Well not if I can help it!

Why not help with disseminating the truth yourself? - If you have any friends who are overweight and know from experience that dieting does not work, tell them about my blog or send them a link to my website. - Better still, tell your MP about my website. - I'm afraid my own MP is as much use as a chocolate teapot...)o:

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

The Government's Change4Life anti-obesity campaign is too "simplistic" and partly funded by the companies that cause the problem, the Lancet says.

Multi-million pound Change4Life obesity campaign too 'simplistic'
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"Ministers hope that the push, which includes participation from food companies such as Pepsi and retailers and an £8 million television campaign, will ease a growing trend which has left one in four Britons obese.

But the Lancet medical journal says that the decision to allow producers of fatty and sugary foods, which it accuses of contributing to the obesity crisis, to take part in the campaign "beggared belief"."

Actually, 'fatty foods', as such, do not contribute to obesity. - It is SALTY foods that need to be avoided in order to lose excess weight. - And the emphasis on exercise as helping to reduce obesity is a red herring. - Despite the claims constantly made about exercise and despite its many health benefits, there is no scientific evidence that it helps with weight loss. On the contrary, there is evidence that with children at any rate, it neither prevents nor reduces obesity. - But I do agree that the food companies bear a lot of the responsibility for the increasing incidence and severity of obesity. - This is because they have for many years ladled harmfully excessive levels of salt into bread and into processed food and they are being very slow about reducing these levels...

The medical profession probably bears most responsibilty for the obesity crisis as they have consistently misinformed people of the facts about obesity and how to reduce it, and their reckless over-prescribing of drugs that actually CAUSE obesity, is a national scandal.

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

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.