Atkins diet beats low-fat fare
Happy to see a mainstream study on the Atkins diet. As I've been saying here for awhile, they should actually study the diet BEFORE saying it's unhealthy. Unfortunately, the people conducting the study approached The Atkins Center for funding. I think that taints the study but you may not hear that from the establishment because they may not be too happy to discuss how almost all of the medical studies are funded...
In a big win for Atkins Study Says a Protein May Be Better Than Cholesterol in Predicting Heart Disease Risk....
Apparently HALF the people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels!!! This is shocking news...how did we just notice this now? And doesn't this mean the establishment used a bit of overkill in their recommendations?
Yahoo! News - Bed Forces Sleepyheads to Rise in Morning
Wow! What a story!
From the kill 2 birds with one stone department...The Straits Times reports Side effects slow progress in fighting fat.
AFTER decades of hunting for the perfect diet pill, scientists thought they might have found a family of chemicals that could become a new generation of powerful weight-loss drugs.Mice and rats given the drugs, which act on the brain, dramatically reduced their food intake while seeming to suffer no ill effects. Several drug companies were so encouraged that they had begun testing the compounds, called melanocortin 4 receptor agonists, in people.
But researchers conducting those trials began to report an unexpected side effect: Men given the medicines experienced prolonged, unwanted and sometimes uncomfortable erections.
In a rare show of blindness to the marketing possibilities and income potential, the pharmaceutical company viewed this side effect as a setback. I can already here the internet version of some slogans for this new drug...
Low Carb Diet Studied in the short-term deemed safe.
Pharmaceutical companies have no shame. They are feeding on fear of cancer. I just saw an ad, telling you about their website, a bunch of junk marketing their drug to help you with your cancer and even telling you to check out their ad in Health magazine. huh??? So if I have cancer, learn all about it from an ad where you are trying to sell your drug and make sure to check your ad?????? Are you kidding me? This is really disgusting!
16 year old teen was killed, apparently by taking an unregulated dietary supplement that is deadly and drug-like. If you hear your kids talking about Yellow Jackets, be aware what it may mean. It's getting really "hot" these days among teens.
Jama has released a study called Prevalence and Trends in Obesity Among US Adults, 1999-2000. Surprise, we are getting fatter. The health profession keeps giving us advice and we keep getting fatter. And whether you agree or disagree with the low carb diets, the fact remains that among all these expensive studies, not one decent study, with a decent sample size, has been done to test the diet and in general to do an exhaustive survey of the 3 basic components of food. Protein Fat and Carbohydrates and their effect on BMI. I mean, how tough can it be to figure out that we should do this? How hard could it be? It's not like there are 10,000 components of food types?? Let's get serious.
I always enjoyed Teri Garr's movies. I'm sorry to hear that she has MS
TECHNOEROTICA - October 2002 has an interesting take on Low Carb dieting.
Roger Short has resurrected an old method of birth control and through an unseen PR machine made it among the top stories on Yahoo today.
But what I found interesting, amidst all the talk of Yahoo's switch from the old search system to a new one, is that the news story had a link to to HIV websites. And at the top of the list, basically, to use an old newspaper term "Above the fold", all results are "Sponsor Matches" which come from Overture (formerly goto.com). And the top one says this:
"Colloidal Silver Is a Mineral Supplement - Read testimonials by HIV+ people who claim amazing benefits of colloidal silver.
http://utopiasilver.com/CSvsHIV.htm"
If you've been following my blog, you will know what I think of those Colloidal Silver "remedies. It may make your skin turn blue permanently, like that politician who made it to Yahoo's Most Popular page in a most unpleasant way for himself.
Here's a quickie:
Novel form of vitamin D shown to grow bone.
Belly Size Better Gauge of Heart Risk Than Obesity is one of the most popular news stories on Yahoo today. One day I will share some thoughts on diets and the debate between Protein/Carbs & Low Fat diets. But it's interesting that this bit of news came out today. The folks who wrote Protein Power have said the same thing some time ago.
Science is supposed to be objective. Unbiased. Certainly if the person performing an experiment has a monetary stake towards having the outcome of an experiment go a certain way, that taints everything. And yet our society seems to believe that Medicine is scientific when in fact it is corrupt to the very core.
The focus of the vast majority of the Medical field revolves around drugs. Dr. Robert O. Becker provided a first hand perspective as to how and why this occurred. It all dates back to the helplessness society felt when someone got pneumonia and the great relief penicillin brought to society. But like with most things that start with the best of intentions, money and power has long since taken over.
Pharmaceutical companies control medicine today. I have once close friend who is a Doctor. I have enjoyed many events gratis thanks to being invited by salespeople of the Pharmaceutical companies. They cater to Doctors because they want to get the Doctors to prescribe their drugs. Not because it's scientific. Not because it's best for the Doctor's patients, but because it makes money for the Drug Company who pays the salary of the salesperson.
I also have a friend who is a researcher. For a very big drug company. She has done lots of research on lots of studies. Very well respected in her field. So I said, wow, you must have been published hundreds of times. She said no. Huh?
Why, I asked. It turns out that the pharmaceutical companies don't like to list all the names of the scientists who worked on a study because then when it shows up in the periodicals the Doctor's read, it doesn't look "seemly". Despite knowing the answer, I asked why? She said, well let's take Viagra as an example. If you have a hundred scientists working on Viagra trials and they all work for Merck, and all their names and the name "Merck" is all over the study it doesn't carry the same weight as if it was an independent study, does it? She's right, no it doesn't. But the fact remains that pharmaceutical companies do studies on drugs they have a vested interest in and these studies have a huge impact on what drugs become popular as does the sales efforts of the pharmaceutical companies. Not to mention the TV ads for Ambien and Claritin etc...
And she told me some other details about how they find the volunteers to do the studies. Just frightening. She told me herself that she doesn't trust any study she reads anymore...and this is her job!!
Shameful, isn't it?
This is just a theory based on my experience. Someone came up with the concept of 20/20 vision (if you know the history of it or a url which describes it, please let me know), probably by doing a study where charts were placed 20 feet away from many individuals and a typical text size visible by the average person was determined. At some point, "eye doctors" decided to start testing individuals for how well they see and if someone had "worse" vision than 20/20, they were "prescribed" eyeglasses.
It has been my experience that as soon as I got new glasses, I would get headaches and feel very uncomfortable. It would take a few weeks to get used to the glasses and within a few months my vision would get worse. I was just a kid when this all happened and never realized the ramifications of what was happening until much later. So when my vision would get "worse" I would go back to the eye doctor and get new glasses. This cycle kept repeating itself until one time I decided to live with the "inferior" vision. But by then the damage had been done and I now have 10.00 thick glasses and can barely see anything without them.
Again, it's a theory, but I firmly believe that the cause of my bad vision is the false assumption that vision below 20/20 is "bad" for you. I believe your eyes "want to see" at a certain level and by prescribing glasses your eyes adjust downward to the level they want to be. I only wish that eyes had the ability to readjust in the other direction by stopping to wear glasses.
If you'd like to see more info on how we are being misled by the "eye doctors" in our society, just pay a visit to Surgical Eyes to see what Lasik has done to a lot of people.
I need to reread my entry and make it a bit clearer, but essentially I believe that the glasses I've been prescribed caused eyestrain and this eyestrain contributed to the worsening of my vision. Funnily enough, today I ran across MESH DiaWebLog which had a link to Will sitting too close to the TV, reading with bad light, etc., ruin your eyes? article at The Straight Dope.