Welcome to my blog - please tell me what YOU think about some of the things I post. I enjoy your comments. Remember,many of the links to other articles in these posts have a finite existence: there is no way to tell how long they will be in place before being moved or removed!
While the study comes hedged about with "more research needed" and "consult your physician", the bottom line is this:
Women who reported taking black cohosh (5 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites) were at 61 percent lower risk of breast cancer, the researchers found.
Also, those who took an herbal preparation derived from black cohosh called Remifemin had a 53 percent lower risk of the disease.
That is a truly hefty protective finding. Many breast cancers are detected in the post-menopausal years, the risk rising as we age. Unless the use of Black Cohosh is contra-indicated for you in some way, I would call this a valuable line of defense.
This is a very interesting Swedish study, conducted over a more than 30 year period, which persuasively links adolescent obesity in young men with cardiovascular risk later.
The bottom line is that the possibility of early death in men from heart problems, i.e. before 55 years of age, can be made more remote by controlling weight in the late school/early college years.
Unfortunately, that is precisely the age when they think they are immortal.
Used to be people thought they would either have to give up on reading, or abandon every food they enjoyed to stay healthy.
Not so, it seems. We find that chocolate has many positive benefits, and now comes a study that suggests putting fruit in alcohol makes the antioxidants more absorbable and powerful.
An evening with a good book, a box of chocolates and a fruity cocktail can once again be put on the agenda.
I posted on this last week, but somehow or another, the post has disappeared. My comment was Thank Goodness we have people out there not only watching the FDA, but able to interpret their legalese and alert us to the real threat underlying the obscure phrases. THIS IS A VERY REAL THREAT! READ ON.
Who would have thought that "Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration" meant:
All vitamins, nutritional supplements and functional foods will be stripped of their structure & function claims, reducing them to empty labels where virtually nothing at all is allowed to be stated.
Vegetable juice will be regulated as a drug. Raw juice retreats will be raided or shut down.
Growing and selling common garden herbs will get you arrested as a drug dealer.
Massage oils and handheld massagers will be regulated as "medical devices."
Yoga props, pilates machines and weight machines will be regulated as "medical devices" and require FDA approval before being sold or used.
Raw sprouts and other anti-cancer foods will be regulated as drugs.
Bottled water that "treats" dehydration will be regulated as a drug.
Massage therapists who use hot rocks as part of their therapy will have the ROCKS regulated as medical devices! (It's true. The FDA will actually look at a pile of rocks and declare, "Those are medical devices!")
Functional foods, supplements, vitamins and homeopathic remedies will disappear from store shelves, pending FDA "review." (The only things remaining will be processed junk foods and pharmaceuticals, which is exactly what Big Business wants.)
Therapeutic tea products, such as green tea, will be outlawed and confiscated.
Vitamin store owners will be arrested and prosecuted for "practicing medicine without a license."
Citizens owning personal inventories of "unapproved drugs" (vitamins and herbs) may have their homes raided at gunpoint and their inventories confiscated by armed law enforcement agents.
The importation of herbs and functional foods from all countries may be banned.
Sitting there at the end of the day with a refrigerator full of vegetables and not an idea in your tired head?
Do I have a site for you! Not only does Alanna Kellogg, the veggie evangelist, sound as though she is talking JUST to you, she has a collection of simple and tasty veggie recipes second to none.
I love word play, as you may have gathered! But I think I will have to explain that "lolly", in British slang, means money.
You may remember the post about Monsanto patenting the Pig: sounds incredible, but the consequence would be, if such patents were granted, that Monsanto could legally prevent breeders and farmers from breeding pigs whose characteristics were described in the patent claims. And after all, how many unique characteristics could a pig have??
Now this kind of Universal Control is becoming even more Orwelllian, and there's plenty of lolly at stake:
Quote:
The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office will use a patent on broccoli (EP 1069819) for a fundamental ruling, on whether or not conventional plants are patentable. The broccoli in question was merely diagnosed using marker assisted breeding methods to identify its natural occurring genes. The genes were not modified. All other broccoli plants with similar genes are considered as "technical inventions“ by the patent. Thus even their use for breeding and the plants themselves are monopolized. Through this the provision which prohibits the patenting of "essentially biological processes" is to be undermined. The EPO has already granted similar patents: e.g.: only recently the company Enza Zaden Beheer received a patents on pathogen resistant lettuce ( EP1179089B1)
Should the Enlarged Board of Appeal uphold the patent, then this decision (case T0083/05) will be binding for all other pending patent applications and even for animals and their offspring.
There once was a man named Bowdler, who gave his name to the word bowdlerization. This means subsituting an inoffensive word for one that might offend. The example from Shakespeare that sticks in my mind after all these years, is his changing of the phrase "Thy mistress has played the strumpet in my bed" to "Thy mistress has played the trumpet in my bed."
At least Bowdler did not intend to mislead but, however mistakenly, to protect.
The same cannot be said of the FDA. It is obvious that agencies we expect to protect us, do not have that concern as their primary agenda
Agency proposes admittedly misleading use of term ‘pasteurized’
Once again: if it is in a package - don't buy it! Only buy actual food, and you will save yourself a world of grief. Even better, grow it yourself. Consider canning and freezing in season. !
Something else to worry about! Over the last winter, 30% of our North American bee population disappeared. Not through a virus, not because the hives were found littered with dead bodies as is often tragically the case - but quite simply, the hives are suddenly found almost empty.
Almost a third of the crops in this country depend on the pollinating work of honeybees to be viable; without the honeybees, it is not worth while to try to raise certain crops, such as almonds, strawberries and apples. Consider also animal fodder crops such as alfalfa.And bee keepers are going out of business.
A professor at the University of Florida's honeybee research lab has stated: "The agriculture industry is built on the backs of honeybees."
