Seems like if you want to remain toxin free you pretty much need to make it yourself!
A new study suggests certain types of consumer behaviors, including flossing with Oral-B Glide dental floss, contribute to elevated levels in the body of toxic PFAS chemicals. PFAS are water- and grease-proof substances that have been linked with numerous health problems. The findings provide new insight into how these chemicals end up in people’s bodies and how consumers can limit their exposures by modifying their behavior.
Scientists are concerned about widespread exposure to PFAS in the population because the chemicals have been linked with health effects including kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, low birth weight, decreased fertility, and effects on the immune system.
Other behaviors that were associated with higher PFAS levels included having stain-resistant carpet or furniture and living in a city served by a PFAS-contaminated drinking water supply. Additionally, among African American women, those who frequently ate prepared food in coated cardboard containers, such as French fries or takeout, had elevated blood levels of four PFAS chemicals compared to women who rarely ate such food. The researchers did not see the same relationship with prepared food among non-Hispanic whites.
“Overall, this study strengthens the evidence that consumer products are an important source of PFAS exposure,” says Boronow. “Restricting these chemicals from products should be a priority to reduce levels in people’s bodies.”
I share this for my US friends and because it is a salutory lesson in what can go wrong when you try to game the system with unhealthy shortcuts.
If you live in an urban area, should you be concerned about the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in U.S. deer herds?
CWD has caused hundreds of captive deer to be euthanized on commercial deer farms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Pennsylvania. The disease has also spread to non-captive (wild) deer herds.
CWD hasn’t been widely publicized. So it’s no surprise that many people, whether they live in rural or urban areas, are unaware of the issue. But among those urban dwellers who are aware, there’s often little concern—because most people think CWD affects only rural areas, namely hunters and Departments of Natural Resources (DNRs) that depend on hunting licenses for revenue.
In fact, recent scientific reports suggest that whether you live in the city, the suburbs or the country, you should be concerned about CWD—and you should take precautions.
What is CWD?
CWD is a fatal, transmissible neurological disease that affects members of the deer family, including white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk and moose.
It’s called a “prion” disease because it’s caused by microscopic “prions,” defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “misfolded forms of proteins naturally found in the body . . . [that] can convert normally folded prion protein molecules into an infectious form when they come in contact with each other.”
According to the NIH, these misshapen prion proteins clump together and accumulate in brain tissue. Once that happens, it’s impossible to get rid of them. They aren’t deactivated by cooking, heat, autoclaves, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation.
But here’s something that gets very little attention: Prions also remain in the soil indefinitely.
Colorado Division of Wildlife personnel recently found out just how indestructible prions are when they tried to eradicate CWD from a contaminated facility. Staff treated the soil with chlorine, removed the treated soil, then applied another chlorine treatment to the remaining soil and let the facility remain vacant for more than a year.
A year later, the soil still tested positive for the prion disease.
In humans, a prion-related disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a degenerative brain disease that leads to dementia and is ultimately fatal. CJD in humans is similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease.
Research suggests CWD not limited to animals and humans
CWD is commonly thought to affect only animals. However, a 2015 study by University of Texas Health Science Center suggests that the leaves and roots of grass plants can bind, uptake and transport infectious prions.
Even highly diluted amounts of the infected prion protein were absorbed by the roots and leaves of the grass plants, in as little as two minutes, according to the UT the researchers. When fed to hamsters, the prion-contaminated grass infected the hamsters.
The fact that humans could eat grass plants—such as wheat grass, typically considered a health food—infected with CWD should give people pause, regardless of where they live.
Here’s another reason for people who don’t live in rural areas to fear prion diseases like CWD: Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the University of California at San Diego and UC-San Francisco, found that people with CJD have the prions in their eyes. That means there is a risk for the disease to spread via prion-contaminated instruments, during eye surgeries or even routine eye exams, according the researchers.
As reported by Live Science, researchers “found prions in all eight regions of the eye that were tested, including the cornea, lens, ocular fluid, retina, choroid (a part of the eye that contains blood vessels and connective tissue), sclera (the white of the eye), optic nerve (which connects the back of the eye to the brain) and extraocular muscle (which controls eye movement).”
Where do prion diseases come from?
Mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also transmitted by prions, is widely believed to stem from the cost-cutting practice of feeding cows to cows. Similarly, CWD may have man-made origins.
Captive deer operations are a main source of CWD due to their concentration of animals, “communicability window” (from trophy stock trading and escaped animals) and questionable feed sources. In a four-part expose, the Indiana Star revealed how “the pursuit of deer bred for enormous antlers and shot in hunting pens” on trophy farms is spreading CWD at an alarming rate.
Infected sheep may also be to blame. In the mid-1960s, the Department of Wildlife ran a series of nutritional studies on wild deer and elk at the Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. Soon after the studies began, however, Foothills deer and elk began dying from a mysterious disease.
It turns out that the deer may have developed CWD as a result of being held at the same facility with sheep that had had scrapie, a fatal, degenerative prion disease affecting the central nervous system of sheep and goats. Research shows that white-tail deer exposed to scrapie are susceptible to developing CWD.
Can you get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) by eating CWD-infected deer meat?
The official position of Departments of Natural Resources (DNR), which depend on revenue from deer-hunting licenses, is that humans can’t get CJD from eating venison from deer infected with CWD.
Yet a 2002 Centers for Disease Control study contradicts that claim. The study, “Fatal Degenerative Neurologic Illnesses in Men Who Participated in Wild Game Feasts,” found numerous cases of hunters and/or men who ate venison who had developed CJD.
To reduce their CWD risk, DNRs warn hunters to wear surgical gloves when cutting up deer and to avoid exposing open cuts or sores on their hands. They tell hunters not to eat a deer’s brain, eyeballs, spinal cord, spleen and lymph nodes. Yet, scientific articles say that muscle, blood, fat and other parts of the animal, including kidneys, pancreas, liver, saliva and antler velvet, also contain prions.
What can consumers do to avoid risk?
There are a number of ways you can limit your personal risk, and also help minimize the overall risk of the spread of CWD.
Take these three critical steps to avoid personal risk:
• Avoid eating venison, especially if it comes from “farmed” deer fed animal waste. Because it’s nearly impossible for deer processors to sterilize their equipment after each deer, cross-contamination is always a risk.
• Avoid any meat that comes from a factory farm. Factory farms often feed confined animals slaughterhouse waste, or rendered animal protein. This practice is prohibited in organic meat production.
• Make sure your eye doctor is aware of the new and concerning risks presented by patients who may have prion diseases.
Here are some things you can do to help address the overall problem:
• Call for an end to game farms. Deer breeding and “trophy farms” are a $4-billion/year industry. Farmers operate canned “hunts” in which bucks with trophy antlers can fetch six figures. Customers are guaranteed a kill, and the animals are sometimes drugged. Deer farm operators also sell antlers, velvet, urine and meat.
• Protest the widespread trapping and killing of wolves. Wolves serve the important ecological purpose of culling diseased deer from the herd––a function which is lost when they are hunted and trapped.
• Call on the CDC to require autopsies on people whose death certificate reads “Alzheimer’s disease” or “dementia.” Many of these people, especially deer hunters, actually have died from CJD but are buried or cremated with no disclosure. The public deserves to know these risks, which can be transferred through surgical instruments and bodily fluids.
New study raises further safety concerns over GM Bt crops
GM Bt crops are engineered to express Bt toxins, insecticides that are intended to kill pests that feed on the crops. The GMO industry claims that its Bt toxins are safe for human and animal consumers – and all living organisms outside the narrow range of targeted pests.
But a new study (abstract below) casts these claims into doubt and raises new questions about the safety of GM Bt toxin.
The study performed in mice found that the GM Bt toxin Cry1Ac is immunogenic, allergenic, and able to induce anaphylaxis (a severe allergic response that can result in suffocation). The responses that Cry1Ac was found to produce in the mice included “mildly allergic manifestations” around the mouth, nose and ears, as well as wheezing, hair standing on end, and diarrhea.
The study also found that Cry1Ac provoked intestinal lymphoid hyperplasia, a condition marked by an increase in the number of cells contained in lymph nodes. The condition is associated with food allergy, inflammatory bowel disease, and colon cancer.
GM Bt crops likely to be more allergenic
The Bt toxin tested in the mouse study was a GM form isolated from E. coli bacteria. This is not the same form of the protein that is expressed in GM Bt crops. The difference lies in the fact that the Bt toxin engineered into GM Bt crops acquires alterations known as post-translational modifications (e.g. the addition of sugar-type molecular structures to the amino acid chain backbone of the protein – a modification known as “glycosylation”). These modifications are absent in the bacterially expressed Bt toxins because bacteria are unable to produce them.
Post-translational modifications are of interest because they can contribute to making a protein (Bt toxin in this case) immunogenic and allergenic and thus turn a previously safe food crop into one that can cause immunogenic or allergenic reactions in the consumer.
All this means that the Bt toxins expressed in GM Bt crops are even more likely to be immunogenic and/or allergenic than the bacterially expressed Bt toxins tested in this experiment.
Also, the GM Bt toxins that are tested and assessed for safety in regulatory authorisations are bacterially expressed and thus these tests are likely to underestimate the potential of a complete GM Bt crop plant to cause immune or allergic responses.
In addition to these inadequate tests, the EU currently insists on a 90-day animal feeding study with single-trait GMOs, which does test the GM plant for shorter-term effects. But pro-GMO scientists and lobbyists are attempting to persuade the EU to do away with this requirement altogether, meaning that GM Bt crops would be put onto the market with no testing in a living organism.
The GM Bt toxins tested in this experiment, as well as the GM Bt toxins expressed in GM Bt plants, are different from the natural Bt toxin spray used for decades by organic and conventional farmers, as explained in a recent analysis.
In the words of the GM Bt crop developer Monsanto, the GM Bt toxins in GM crops were especially engineered to be “super toxins” because they have “broad spectrum activity”. In contrast, natural Bt toxin affects only certain types of insect pests and degrades rapidly in daylight, so non-target organisms and human consumers are unlikely to be exposed.
Biologists have found out that if the leaf of a plant starts to get eaten it is able to give off a warning to other leaves. They do this by using similar signals to animals in distress. Biologists are continuing to study the mystery of how plants are able to take to each other. This is right. It was proven in the late 50s and written up in the press at that time!
Why on earth would anyone with this knowledge be of any mind other than that the media would be biting the hand that feeds them if they published the truth on how beneficial vitamins, minerals and organic foods were and how toxic and destructive were mammograms, vaccines, drugs, chemo and radiation.
This is spot on. And yet the vast majority of us have yet to adopt an operating basis based on this truth. We are under and misinformed and outright lied to about what is healthy and what is not and most of us consider ourselves too busy or not interested enough to take the time to educate ourselves on the subject of nutrition. Even most of the articles available online barely scratch the surface.
For instance if you look online using the search term “types of nutrients” and will read every article on the first page of search results (the vast majority of people don’t get past page one) all you get is protein, carbohydrates, fats and water. Some mention fiber. A few go to the micronutrients of vitamins and minerals. You have to dig deep to get to fulvic minerals. And not one mentioned the 40,000 phytonutrients or enzymes.
So save yourself potentially decades of misery and ill health, get a copy of How To Live The Healthiest Life and read just a page a day. Everyone can find the time to read a page a day. Even if you are super busy, pick the least productive thing you do and swap it out for reading a page of my book. At that rate it will take you more than two years to get through it but it is one of the best investments you can make in your future health!
Not only vaccine antigens have been not detected, there were also 65 signs of chemical contaminants of which only 35% is known, there are among these various processing residues and cross-contaminations from other manufacturing lines, and their identification will be checked during the second level of the analytical study (i.e. with standard controls). 7 chemical toxins among these signals have also been identified, probably deriving from chemical contaminants of the manufacturing process or other manufacturing lines at the vaccine manufacturing site; these toxins have a structure that could probably be partially derived from the formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and cyanogen bromide reaction with other chemical contaminants in the vaccine. We’d like to point out that the toxicity of many of these toxins have been confirmed and published in Pubchem or Toxnet and this poses important safety problems, issues and concerns.
Reality can be sobering, even if simulated. Bottom line, our best defence aginst know and unknown pathogens is a healthy, strong immune system uncompromised by vaccines and other toxins.
