Speaking of Hormones

If you're trying to get pregnant, you really have to be careful not to disrupt your hormones (see perfume posting) with cosmetics, plastics, and of course, hormone therapy. In general playing around with hormones, especially estrogen, is a dicey prospect.

I got this off a journalists' siste:

Hormone Therapy Increases Frequency of Abnormal Mammograms, Breast Biopsies
Combined hormone therapy appears to increase the risk that women will have abnormal mammograms and breast biopsies and may decrease the effectiveness of both methods for detecting breast cancer, according to a report in the February 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. (Embargo expired on 25-Feb-2008 at 16:00 ET)
Archives of Internal Medicine
—American Medical Association (AMA)

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Chemicals in perfume

Personally, I dislike perfume, not just for myself but on other people--it makes me feel like I'm being forced to smell things. Plus, sometimes it makes me sneeze or makes me feel ill...hm...

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times Business section that gives you a little insight on how most perfumes ARE just synthetic chemicals. And remember that musk, synthetic or not, may interfere with hormones.

Remember, what you put on your skin gets into your blood. How do you think "the patch" works?

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February 23, 2008

Ahhh, the Seductive Fragrance of Molecules Under Patent

By CHANDLER BURR

Its scent is reminiscent of a mixture of a just-picked apple and a rose in its prime. But to the Takasago International Corporation, which manufactures this synthetic material, it smells even sweeter.

Last year, that chemical, with the trade name Thesaron, became an essential ingredient in a new perfume, Silver Shadow Altitude, released by Davidoff, a brand owned by Coty. Playing a role in one of the most successful international fragrance trade names — Davidoff has had a scent on the top five perfume best-seller list for the last 20 years — means that molecule is highly profitable for Takasago.

Similarly, the scent makers — Symrise of Holzminden, Germany; Givaudan of Geneva; International Flavors and Fragrances of New York; and Takasago of Tokyo — spend billions on research to find new smell molecules, patent them and sell them. The innovative scents of these “captives,” as the patented molecules are known, are crucial to enticing consumers to buy the 600 or so new perfumes introduced every year and appealing to buyers of other fragrant products like soaps and air fresheners.

Captives have other virtues as well. Jean Jacques, Takasago perfumer, put Thesaron in Altitude, for example, because it solved three problems: Thesaron has the fruity/rosy note of a very expensive class of molecules called rose ketones, but it costs far less and can be used in unlimited amounts (rose ketones are restricted because they set off allergic reactions at high doses).

...One example is a molecule that stays firmly on fabric, perfect for scenting laundry detergents. “That’s a specific attribute we like to see,” he said....One recent successful Takasago captive is l-muscone. A musk, l-muscone has been known for years, but no one could come up with a way to make it economically until Takasago did. It then patented not the molecule but the synthesis pathways to produce it.

L-muscone is still expensive (“It’s a luxury material,” Mr. Warr said, “costing high four figures per pound”), and it has no trade name yet because Takasago does not sell it to anyone else. It’s a “nature identical” — identical to the molecule found naturally in a gland in the musk deer — but Takasago produces only the synthetic version.

Andrea Lupo, a perfumer at Takasago, put l-muscone in the perfume Intimately Night for David and Victoria Beckham and Coty, their licensee.

read more here.

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BIG SUVs not necessarily safer

This is interesting. We used to love our 1986 Jetta, not only for its 30something mpg for also because it felt very safe, as in very manueverable. My SUV driving contingent in the family used to make fun of us. We're just sad the car diedo n the side of 95 with almost 200K miles!

We drive a Volvo compact, nowhere near the great gas mileage, but it's been very safe (e.g., when we were rearended by a pickup truck driver)

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From the Rocky Mountain Institute:

Laura Schewel is an analyst with MOVE - The Transportation Innovation Group and Noah Buhayar is a fellow at Rocky Mountain Institute.

Many consumers believe that the goals of a "safer car" and a "more fuel-efficient car" are at loggerheads, and that any increase in gas mileage will lead directly to increased fatalities.

This misconception is based in large part on a common assumption: The heavier the car, the safer it must be. Collectively, Americans have bought into this idea. The mass of the average personal vehicle in the U.S. has gone up 29% since 1987.

While that idea that more steel equals more protection seems intuitive, it turns out to be false. In fact, the best scientific research shows that automotive safety has nothing to do with vehicle weight, but everything to do with vehicle size and design.

Safety for you and your family
Heavier cars are not safer in a collision. Why? Cars are not simple, solid objects that collide like billiard balls on a table; they have crush zones and structural features designed to absorb impact.

The more crush zone available (the longer or wider the car) and the better the structural design, the safer the occupants will be in a crash.

These examples from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent, nonprofit organization that compiles fatality statistics, illustrate the point:

• Drivers in a Dodge Neon or Chevrolet Cavalier (2,400 and 2,700 pounds, respectively) are twice as likely to die in their vehicles as drivers of Volkswagen Jettas or Honda Civics (2,300 and 2,700 pounds), due to the superior crash design and safety features of the Jetta and Civic.
• Drivers of a Toyota 4Runner (the safest SUV) are 25 times less likely to die in their vehicles than those who drive Chevrolet Blazers -- the least-safe SUV and the least-safe personal vehicle -- again due to superior design. (Statistics cover model years 1995-1999.)

read more here.

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Beef Recall

If you want/need yet another reason to eat organic--and even better, get your meat locally!--read thisfrom the New York Times.

Also, watch the movie King Corn if you want to understand (graphically) why, when you feed cows corn instead of what they're supposed to eat--grass--makes them SICK.

P.S. I love how the Ag. Dept says it's "probably safe" because the meat's been eaten already. WTF??? How's that going to protect you from whatever disease the sick cow was carrying??
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From the New York Times:

A California meat company on Sunday issued the largest beef recall in history, 143 million pounds, some of which was used in school lunch programs, Department of Agriculture officials announced.

The recall by the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, based in Chino, Calif., comes after a widening animal-abuse scandal that started after the Humane Society of the United States distributed an undercover video on Jan. 30 that showed workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts to force them to walk.

The video raised questions about the safety of the meat, because cows that cannot walk, called downer cows, pose an added risk of diseases including mad cow disease. The federal government has banned downer cows from the food supply.

Agriculture officials said there was little health risk from the recalled meat because the animals had already passed pre-slaughter inspection and much of the meat had already been eaten. In addition, the officials noted that while mad cow disease was extremely rare, the brains and spinal cords from the animals — the area most likely to harbor the disease — would not have entered the human food chain.

“The great majority has probably been consumed,” said Dr. Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety.

The video was embarrassing for the Department of Agriculture, as inspectors are supposed to be monitoring slaughterhouses for abuse. It surfaced after a year of increasing concerns about the safety of the meat supply amid a sharp increase in the number of recalls tied to a particularly deadly form of the E. coli pathogen.

There were 21 recalls of beef related to the potentially deadly strain of E. coli last year, compared with eight in 2006 and five in 2005. No one is quite sure what caused the increase, though theories include the cyclical nature of pathogens and changes in cattle-feeding practices caused by the ethanol boom.

read more here.

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Psychiatric Drugs and School Shootings

I'm posting this from Mike Adams the Health Ranger because I feel I've kind of noticed the same thing. At least, I remember the kids at Columbine were coming off Paxil or something like that. Scary stuff.

Here's a link to PBS' Frontline (and they're questioning whether PBS still deserves funding???) on the overprescription of psychotropic drugs to VERY young children and the permanent harm it can do: The Medicated Child.

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Dear NaturalNews / NewsTarget readers,

Due to widespread misreporting of the Illinois shooting incident by the mainstream media (MSM), I'm issuing a weekend e-mail alert that tells the truth about the link between psychiatric drugs and every school shooting that has taken place in the United States in the last decade. Here's the first section from the article posted today:

(NaturalNews) It comes as no surprise to anyone who's been following school shootings all the way back to the Colombine High massacre in Colorado: Every young, male shooter that has gone on a killing spree in the United States also has a history of treatment with psychotropic drugs -- typically SSRI antidepressants. These shootings have three things in common: 1) The shooters are young males. 2) The shooters exhibit a mind-numbed disconnect with reality. 3) The shooters have a history of taking psychiatric drugs.

This latest shooting by 27-year-old Stephen Kazmierczak shares the same three factors. Stephen was considered a "normal, undistressed person," according to press reports. He was considered "an outstanding student" and even received a Dean's Award for outstanding work in sociology. So what happened to Stephen's brain that caused him to snap and open fire on students in a college classroom?

Psych meds make good people do bad things
Psychiatric drugs, of course, are well known to cause extremely violent thoughts and behavior in young males. This is actually acknowledged by the FDA and is found in the black-box warnings printed on the packaging for such drugs. In Europe, the prescribing of many such drugs to children and teens is actually illegal. But in the United States, where psychiatric medications have become the "new medicine" for American youth, nobody seems to pay attention to the simple fact that every school shooting we've seen in the last decade has been committed by a young male with a history of treatment with these dangerous mind-altering chemicals...

Click here to continue reading this article at http://www.naturalnews.com/022656.html

Regards,
- Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

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REVIEW: Nectar of Life Coffee

If you still want to drink coffee, but less (given all the studies about coffee-miscarriage-infertility) one idea is to drink dark roasts because (1) less caffeine (counterintuitive, but true) and (2) you need to use less coffee.

Nectar of Life sent me their HAPPY PLACE dark roast, and wow it was so strong I use about 6 beans and I'm done. Their coffee is fair trade, organic, and kosher, and the taste was fantastic. They are serious about their roasting (from the website):

Co-Founder and Master Roaster, Martin F. Jennings III, graduated with High Honors from the University of California, Davis with a degree in Viticulture and Enology. Martin went on to make fine wines in both California and Washington State. His love of coffee and organic products brought him to a point where he knew that there must be a way to roast organic coffees to have the same full-bodied flavors as the world's finest non-organic gourmet coffees. With his experience in chemistry, and sensory (flavor) science Martin left the wine industry to pursue roasting the finest organic coffees of the world. The result is the Nectar of Life®.

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Soy Good, Bad...or Both?

If you do a little reading, soy is either the healthiest food in the world (and good for fertility) or the devil itself, and about as helpful for conception as taking a handful of birth control pills.

Could it possibly be that both are right?

When I wrote the article for Natural Health on fermented foods, I noticed that most cultures eat soy as a fermented product (tempeh, miso, in Korea, doenchang). It appears fermentation helps predigest the soy and also neutralize all sorts of things that are bad for your thyroid, etc. And, not surprisingly, it's the weirdly processed soy (e.g., your soy baloney) that's the worst for you. Make sense? So now that the US is overproducing soy and pushing it on everyone...well...you see where I'm going. Put it this way, eating unfermented soy or taking soy supplements might not be the healthiest thing to do, especially if you have thyroid disease and/or are trying to get pregnant.

From Natural News:

Perhaps the most disturbing of soy's ill effects on health has to do with its phytoestrogens, which can mimic the effects of the female hormone, oestrogen. These phytoestrogens have been found to have adverse effects on various human tissues, and drinking only two glasses of soy milk daily for one month has enough of the chemical to alter a woman's menstrual cycle.

Soy is particularly problematic for infants and it would be very wise to avoid giving them soy-derived products, since it has been estimated that infants who are exclusively fed soy formula receive the equivalent of five birth control pills worth of oestrogen every day. Check out (www.westonaprice.org) to find some alarming research and statistics on what can go wrong when infants and children are regularly fed soy formula.

In order to derive some benefit from soy, consuming only fermented soy products - such as organic miso (mugi barley and genmai miso are the best), organic tempeh, soy sauce or tamari and natto - is the way to do it. This is because the phytic acid, which is inherent in soy beans, has been neutralized in the process of fermentation. Consuming fermented soy is very beneficial in recolonizing the friendly bacteria in the large intestine, which neutralizes the 'unfriendly' bacteria and allows for greater general assimilation of foods and nutrients.

Another common fallacy is that soy foods couldn't possibly have a downside because Asian cultures eat large quantities of soy every day and consequently remain free of most western diseases. In reality, the people of China, Japan and other Asian countries eat very little soy. The soy industry's own figures show that soy consumption in China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and Taiwan ranges from 10 to 90 grams per day. That is grams of soy food, not grams of soy protein alone. Compare this with a cup of tofu (250 grams) or soy milk (240 grams). Many Americans and Australians today would be consuming a cup of tofu and a couple of glasses of soy milk every day. They might also add veggie burgers to this, thinking they are getting their much needed protein intake. Infants on soy formula are probably the most disadvantaged, as that is their main source of nutrition and they ingest large amounts of soy relative to their body weight. Often the side effects are not noticed but, as they are growing up, runny noses, frequent colds, irritability, severe sugar cravings and food intolerance develop.

The summary below outlines the adverse effects of unfermented soy products:

* Trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion and may cause pancreatic disorders. In test animals soy containing trypsin inhibitors caused stunted growth.

* Soy phytoestrogens disrupt endocrine function and have the potential to cause infertility and to promote breast cancer in adult women.

* Soy phytoestrogens are potent anti-thyroid agents that cause hypothyroidism and may cause thyroid cancer. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.
Vitamin B12 analogs in soy are not absorbed and actually increase the body's requirement for B12.
Soy foods increase the body's requirement for vitamin D.

* Fragile proteins are denatured during high temperature processing to make soy protein isolate and textured vegetable protein.

* Free glutamic acid or MSG, a potent neurotoxin, is formed during soy food processing and additional amounts are added to many soy foods.

* Soy foods contain high levels of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.
Source: (www.westonaprice.org)

--Teya Skae M.A., B.A.,Dip Health Sciences, Dip Clinical Nutrition

read more here.

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