Fishing Industry Paying for Study Whose Conclusion is that Women Should Eat more Fish!

The mercury is rising in our seas, and mostly the arguments seem to be, is there enough mercury in seafood to make you ill, what's the science behind all this, etc. Instead of concentrating on issues like WHY is seafood contaminated , what's the deal with factory farming of fish, and why are we allowing the seas to become overfished?

I see there's a whole spate of articles on seafood isn't THAT bad for you, or this is just another silly health scare, etc. But you might want to think about where these stories are coming from.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15005507

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Appendix might not be "useless"

Next time your doctor suggests you get rid of "useless" body parts (e.g., tonsils,; not so long ago they recommended women get rid of the old' uterus when it wasn't needeed anymore because it might become cancerous some day...even thought penile and testicular cancer exists as well), you might want to reconsider.

If you read my Natural Health article, you'll see that unless you eat unpasteurized, artisanally fermented foods, as people of old used to do daily, you probably aren't getting too much beneficial bacteria, which is essential for health. It turns out the appendix might have evolved as a storage pouch for these pro-biotics:

(NewsTarget) Theorists may have unlocked the purpose for the appendix, the organ in the gut at the juncture of the large and small intestine, long thought useless. The theory calls upon observations and experiments done at Duke University Medical Center.

While not definitive, it seems that the purpose for the vestigial organ could be to repopulate the gut with beneficial bacteria after a catastrophic die-off. If the body has an exceptionally bad bout of food poisoning, diarrhea, cholera or otherwise purges the contents of the lower gut, the beneficial flora are eliminated as well.

The position of the appendix is such that it avoids the purge. The beneficial bacteria within the appendix can repopulate the gut prior to bad bacteria gaining a foothold. Some have compared it to "rebooting" the gut, which is a major part of all good holistic colon cleanse programs.

Surgeons are quick to point out that in a "modern industrial society" the purpose of the appendix is marginalized by advances in modern medicine. According to the CDC 300 to 400 Americans die from appendicitis each year out of the approximately 320,000 who are diagnosed with it. It is for this reason that the CDC and surgeons recommend having the appendix removed in the event of inflammation.

Professor Douglas Theobald of Brandies University says that the idea “seems by far the most likely” explanation, and it “makes evolutionary sense.”

This news could cause a less cavalier approach to the removal of other “useless” body parts. Professor Gary Huffnagle of the University of Michigan says, “I'll bet eventually we'll find the same sort of thing with the tonsils.”

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*An Afternoon Nap Improves Your Memory say Israeli Researchers*

This is nice news:

According to researchers at the University of Haifa, a 90-minute siesta
helps speed up the process of long-term memory consolidation.

In a recent study, Prof. Avi Karni and Dr. Maria Korman of the Center
for Brain and Behavior Research at the University of Haifa found that
an afternoon nap changes the course of consolidation in the brain. "We
still don't know the exact mechanism of the memory process that occurs
during sleep, but the results of this research suggest the possibility
that it is possible to speed up memory consolidation, and in the
future, we may be able to do it artificially," said Karni.

Long-term memory is defined as a permanent memory that does not
disappear, or that disappears after many years. Long-term memory is
divided into two types---memories of "what" (for example: what happened
yesterday or what one remembers from an article one read yesterday) and
memories of "how to" (for example: how to read Hebrew, how to drive,
play basketball or play the piano).

In the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience,
the researchers worked with two groups of participants. Group members
practiced a repeated motor activity which consisted of bringing the
thumb and a finger together in a specific sequence. The research
examined the "how" aspect of memory in the participants' ability to
perform the task quickly and in the correct sequence.

One of the groups was allowed to nap for an hour and a half after
learning the task while the other group stayed awake. The researchers,
who worked in cooperation with the Sleep Laboratory at the Sheba
Medical Center and researchers from the Department of Psychology at the
University of Montreal, found that the group that slept in the
afternoon showed a distinct improvement in their task performance by that
evening, as opposed to the group that stayed awake, which didn't exhibit any
improvement.

Following an entire night's sleep, both groups exhibited the same skill
level.

There's more to this story, but according to the ISRAELI21c sources "if
you need to memorize something quickly or you've got lots of different
activities to learn how to do at one go, better find some time for an
afternoon snooze."

(By Staff, www.Israel21c.org, January 8, 2008)

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Caffeine and miscarriage--the ONION

From The Onion:

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Caffeine Increases Miscarriage Chances

A new study by Kaiser Permanente Research Division in Oakland, CA says that the caffeine in two cups of coffee per day can double the chances of an expectant mother miscarrying. What do you think?

Marc Burns,
Car Rental Agent
"Coffee's for saps. You really want to miscarry, you go drink yourself some bleach."

Yvone Riley,
Tech Support
"Falling down stairs and now this? Where is a pregnant woman expected to find any joy?"

Karl Pawlett,
Dry Cleaner
"Okay, but those expectant mothers were also playing really violent video games on a somewhat regular basis. So, let's not just blame the caffeine."

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NYT: Chefs' New Goal: Looking Dinner in the EYE

Hm, does this look familiar? There must be something in the air. From the NY Times:

Angie Norwood Browne, right

ETHICS OF MEAT Chefs like Jamie Oliver and Tamara Murphy are more concerned with the way animals are raised.

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: January 16, 2008

LAST Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.

“A chicken is a living thing, an animal with a life cycle, and we shouldn’t expect it will cost less than a pint of beer in a pub,” he said Monday in an interview.

“It only costs a bit more to give a chicken a natural life and a reasonably pleasant death,” he told the champagne-sipping audience before he stunned the chicken, cut an artery inside its throat, and let it bleed to death, all in accordance with British standards for humane slaughter.

Mr. Oliver said that he wanted people to confront the reality that eating any kind of meat involves killing an animal, even if it is done with a minimum of pain.

read more here.

As always, you can use our stuff:

USERNAME: GreenFertility
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related articles from the blog:

• http://greenfertility.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-kosher-meat-is-healthier.html#links
• http://greenfertility.blogspot.com/2007/12/well-folks-heres-part-ii-of-meeting.html
  

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High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi

This article is notable for many reasons. First, eating fish can give you mercury poisoning--so why aren't we doing anything about coal plant emissions and things that CAUSE high mercury?

Second, they are, prudently, warning pregnant and breastfeeding women to NOT eat fish because the mercury can harm their baby...and yet INJECTING mercury and other heavy metals (at least through the digestive tract, there are certain detox mechanisms, but you bypass them all if you inject it directly) into pregnant moms and babies is 100% safe? Hello? Also, if you start with a large mercury burden in your body, give birth, then add a few pieces of sushi's worth of mercury, aluminum, etc., into a newborn, I think Grandma would say, that just can't be good...

Unfortunately, we've contaminated a perfectly healthy source of food. FertiltiyBitch's suggestion is to stay away, FAR AWAY, from tuna altogether.
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From the NY Times:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October...

“The owner of a restaurant whose tuna sushi had particularly high mercury concentrations said he was shocked by the findings. “I’m startled by this,” said the owner, Drew Nieporent, a managing partner of Nobu Next Door. “Anything that might endanger any customer of ours, we’d be inclined to take off the menu immediately and get to the bottom of it.”

Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.

“Mercury levels in bluefin are likely to be very high regardless of location,” said Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that works to protect the environment and improve human health.

In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.

Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.

No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.

At Blue Ribbon Sushi, Eric Bromberg, an owner, said he was aware that bluefin tuna had higher mercury concentrations. For that reason, Mr. Bromberg said, the restaurant typically told parents with small children not to let them eat “more than one or two pieces.”

Scientists who performed the analysis for The Times ran the tests several times to be sure there was no mistake in the levels of methylmercury, the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems.

The work was done at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, in Piscataway, a partnership between Rutgers and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School....

In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.

A number of studies have found high blood mercury levels in people eating a diet rich in seafood. According to a 2007 survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the average level of mercury in New Yorkers’ blood is three times higher than the national average. The report found especially high levels among Asian New Yorkers, especially foreign-born Chinese, and people with high incomes. The report noted that Asians tend to eat more seafood, and it speculated that wealthier people favored fish, like swordfish and bluefin tuna, that happen to have higher mercury levels.

The city has warned women who are pregnant or breast-feeding and children not to eat fresh tuna, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, shark, grouper and other kinds of fish it describes as “too high in mercury.” (Cooking fish has no effect on the mercury level.)

Dr. Kate Mahaffey, a senior research scientist in the office of science coordination and policy at the E.P.A. who studies mercury in fish, said “We have seen exposures occurring now in the United States that have produced blood mercury a lot higher than anything we would have expected to see,” Dr. Mahaffey said. “And this appears to be related to consumption of larger amounts of fish that are higher in mercury than we had anticipated.”...

“The current advice from the F.D.A. is insufficient,” said Dr. Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health and chairman of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. “In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure, you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that.”

Some environmental groups have sounded the alarm. Environmental Defense, the advocacy group, says no one, no matter his or her age, should eat bluefin tuna. Dr. Gochfeld said: “I like to think of tuna sushi as an occasional treat. A steady diet is certainly problematic. There are a lot of other sushi choices.”

read more here.

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Drinking coffee may lower ovarian cancer risk: study - Yahoo! News

Then again...

LONDON (Reuters) - Caffeine appears to lower a woman's chances of developing ovarian cancer, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday, while smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol do not.

The benefit for caffeine drinkers also seemed strongest for women who had never used oral contraceptives or postmenopausal hormones, the researchers wrote in the journal Cancer.

'With regard to caffeine and caffeine-containing beverages, we generally observed a lower risk of ovarian cancer with increasing intake,' Shelley Tworoger of Harvard Medical School and colleagues wrote."

read more here:

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