Category: Health Tips

Stephane has done some research and arithmetic to validate getting the government to stop subsidies of corporations. After all, the government are just redistributing our wealth and I prefer to have that choice myself over where it goes.

There is no free lunch, and the cheap ones are not that cheap, either by Stephane Beaudin

What is the cost of a burger flipping drone? The minimal, bare survival amount a human needs? I’ve calculated this for the US, statistics are easier and faster to find, and almost all the numbers I use are from US government sources (plus, I guess a lot of the people who are going to read this will be from the US, and all the others will understand the references more easily than Canadian ones). I am calculating that this drone works 40 hours per week (which makes me an effeminate socialist to some, too bad) 50 weeks per year (what, 2 weeks of unpaid vacation per year, are you trying to destroy the economy?) and never misses a single day’s work, not even to give birth to their average 1.025 children. This drone lives all it’s life sharing a one bedroom apartment with a burger flipping spouse, except for the 20 year period where the couple raises their future burger flipping kids when they will live in a 2 bedroom apartment. This apartment’s rent will be 20% under the national average. They all eat from the USDA thrifty food plan, a bland serving of a meager 2000 daily calories based on the unhealthy food pyramid, they never get even once to taste one of the burgers they flip. They have the basic utilities, electricity, heat, at 20% under the national average. They don’t ride the bus, they have to walk everywhere they go. Our drone will however reach the average expected age of 78.7 years.

In it’s life, this drone will work 94000 hours over 47 years, from 18 to 65. It will require an average of $316600.00 in healthcare for itself and his 1.025 kids, and these kids will cost $123564.00 to educate in the public system, I am not counting daycare costs in this. Thus, what we need to figure out is how much such a drone actually costs per hour, that includes salary, some sort of pension plan, but just the payable part of it, some form of health insurance, and again, only the payable part of it, administration costs and plan provider’s profit cannot be counted in this. And paying taxes for the kid’s education, his public service footprint is actually larger than that, so this cost I am calculating is actually quite a bit low.

And the total? $9.30 per hour.

that is actually an extreme lowball estimate, I have already mentioned some of the items I am not accounting for, others include clothing, furniture and appliances, diapers for the babies and dental care, just off the top of my head.

When salary plus benefits (payable portion of benefits, remember) are under this amount, the employer is paying under the bare minimum survival cost of the resource. This means that the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 has our drone dying of starvation, homeless, but still at his grill at the age of 63. How can employers get away with that? Simple, the job is subsidized with public programs like Medicare-Medicaid and Social Security. What does that mean? If you are among the 53% of American citizens who pay taxes, the government comes to take the difference at gunpoint from your income. You are subsidizing that burger, even if you don’t eat it. Corporations use the government to steal from you so they can offer “lower costs” to you, the corporation gets to be the good guy who sells you affordable meals, but a large chunk of the cost of these meals are hidden in your taxes. On top of the labor costs they are subsidized for (that is a hidden subsidy), there are plenty of overt subsidies, notably agricultural ones that all displace the cost of the food from the price sticker to your tax form. Government gets to be the bad guy who steals your money to feed the 47% who don’t pay taxes, and this is true of almost all industries, not just food. When we know the level of efficiency of the government, you can bet the difference between what the corporation pays and the actual cost will get multiplied if they have to manage it, and that multiplied difference is going to get slapped on just one half of the population, those who pay taxes.

Next time you hear people whining minimum wage kills jobs, remember the alternative is for the government to take the difference out of your pockets. There is no free lunch, somebody has to pay, and when corporations buy resources under cost, that sucker is you.

My daughter Teal rang me this week asking what ingredients to avoid in sunscreens. the very next day I received an email promoting one that looked promising, at first glance. It had a list of natural ingredients at the top of the web site but when I read the fine print it contained Micronised Titanium Dioxide. Here is some interesting data on the difference between products at normal size being non-toxic and micronised or nano-particles (really, really small ones) being destructive to cellular health.

Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, recently admitted that its hydraulic fracturing operations “likely” caused an earthquake in England.

Predictably, this news quickly sent a shockwave through the U.K., the oil and natural gas industries, and the environmental activist community. And it certainly feeds plenty of speculation that the same phenomenon could be occurring elsewhere. Right on the heels of Cuadrilla’s announcement, news is spreading that the United States Geological Survey has released a report (pdf) that links a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma last January to a fracking operation underway there. Evidently, a resident reported feeling some minor earthquakes, spurring the USGS to investigate. They found that some 50 small earthquakes had indeed been registered, ranging in magnitude from 1.0 to 2.8. The bulk of these occurred within 2.1 miles of Eola Field, a fracking operation in southern Garvin County.

Martin Whitely MLA, sent me an email as follows:

The blog below was recently written by Dr Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who on behalf of the American Psychiatric Association led the DSMIV process. The blog encourages people critical of the proposed DSM5 to sign up to an on-line petition organised by several divisions of the American Psychological Association.

Martin Whitely MLA – Author Speed Up and Sit Still http://www.speedupsitstill.com

PS- For information on the proposed revised diagnostic criteria for ADHD in DSM5 see http://speedupsitstill.com/dsm-5-proposal-adhd-%e2%80%93-making-lifelong-patients-healthy-people

US Psychologists Start Petition Against DSM 5

A Users Revolt Should Capture the American Psychiatric Associations Attention by Dr Allen Frances

Originally published October 24 2011, in DSM5 in Distress http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201110/psychologists-start-petition-against-dsm-5

Several divisions of the American Psychological Association have just written an open letter highly critical of DSM 5. They are inviting mental health professionals and mental health organizations to sign a petition addressed to the DSM5 Task Force of the American Psychiatric Association. You can read the letter and sign up at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dsm5/ It is an extremely detailed, thoughtful and well written statement that deserves your attention and support.

The letter summarizes the grave dangers of DSM 5 that for some time have seemed patently apparent to everyone except those who are actually working on it. The short list of the most compelling problems includes: reckless expansion of the diagnostic system (through the inclusion of untested new diagnoses and reduced thresholds for old ones); the lack of scientific rigor and independent review; and dimensional proposals that are too impossibly complex ever to be used by clinicians.

The American Psychiatric Association has no special mandate or ownership rights giving it any sovereignty over psychiatric diagnosis. APA took on the task of preparing DSM’s sixty years ago because it then seemed so thankless that no other group was prepared or willing to do it. The DSM franchise has stayed with APA only because its products were credible enough to gain widespread acceptance. People used the manual only because it was useful.

DSM 5 has strained that credibility to the breaking point and (unless radically changed) will be much more harmful than useful. We have reached a turning point that will soon become a point of no return. A near final version of DSM 5 must be ready by next spring and all final wording will be set in stone within a year. Time is running out if DSM 5 is to be saved from itself.

Rescue attempts and pushback are coming from numerous directions and are fast gaining in momentum. The American Psychological Association’s petition was preceded by an even harsher critique by the British Psychological Society. The Society of Biological Psychiatry has wondered why we need a DSM 5. Experts in personality disorder have universally decried the proposed revisions in DSM 5. And the American Counseling Association will soon weigh in with its own statement.

Meanwhile DSM 5 has lived in a world that seems to be hermetically sealed. Despite the obvious impossibility of many of its proposals, it shows no ability to self-correct or learn from outside advice. The current drafts have changed almost not at all from their deeply flawed originals. The DSM 5 field trials ask the wrong questions and will make no contribution to the endgame.

But the DSM 5 deafness may finally be cured by a users’ revolt. The APA budget depends heavily on the huge publishing profits that accrue from its DSM sales. APA has ignored the scientific, clinical, and public health reasons it should omit the most dangerous suggestions- but I suspect APA will be more sensitive to the looming risk of a boycott by users.

Here are best case and worst case scenarios. Best case: APA opens up DSM 5 to external, independent review and only those suggestions that pass muster are included. DSM 5 becomes safe, usable, and widely used.

Worst case: DSM 5 stumbles along blindly as it has and includes most or all of its harmful suggestions. DSM 5 loses its status as a useful and standard guide to psychiatric diagnosis, creating an unnecessary and unfortunate babel of diagnostic practice and research habits. And the American Psychiatric goes broke.

The APA Trustees and Assembly have thus far been almost completely and puzzlingly passive in exercising their governance role over DSM 5. I believe they can wait no longer if they are to fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to the public, to the mental health field, and to their own membership. It is pretty much now or never.

Bet your doctor doesn’t know this!
(No drug rep is paid to spread this data.)
There is a prescription-strength dose of natural serotonin available from a large handful of cashews.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/prozac.html

Take back ownership and control of it from Big Pharma, Big Farmer and the TV.
Get the fluoride, processed foods, sugar and artificial additives out of your diet.
Broaden the range and variety of nutrient dense foods you eat.
Give it some interval training for 12 minutes a day.
Claim wellness and good health as your inalienable right.
More power to you!

79% of people who die from heart attack have normal or low cholesterol. Even BAD cholesterol has a use – it helps you put on more muscle mass when you exercise. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/26/think-twice-before-using-statin-drugs.aspx

For years now, I have been hearing about the food industry’s influence on the annual conference of the American Dietetic Association — the nation’s largest gathering of nutrition professionals–with some 7,000 registered dietitians in attendance. Last month, I witnessed it for myself and discovered the corporate takeover by Big Food was worse than I even imagined.
The top-paying sponsors, whom ADA called “partners,” were Coca-Cola, Aramark, the National Dairy Council, and Hershey (their “Center for Health and Nutrition” – really). “Premier sponsors” included PepsiCo, Mars, and General Mills.
The exhibit hall seemed more like a processed food trade show than a nutrition conference. I saw very few booths with actual information, apart from that being peddled by the likes of Nestle, Kraft, and McDonald’s, along with (of course), ubiquitous product samples, tastings, and myriad swag. (Oddly, Monsanto’s booth featured its branded, soy-based lip balm.)
But the worst cooptation came during the “educational sessions,” which should have been off limits to marketing. Numerous panels were hosted by industry players, including, “Dairy Innovations,” brought to you by (surprise!) the National Dairy Council, which also hosted a media-only session, as did others.
“Culinary” demos were offered by cooking experts such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Hershey, and McNeil (maker of the fake sugar, Splenda). For attending several “Expo Impact Sessions,” described by ADA as “scientific and evidenced-based,” RDs could even earn continuing educational units. Who better to teach, “Are Sugars Toxic: What’s Wrong with Current Research?” than the Corn Refiners Association? I attended a silly session called “Snacking and the 2010 Dietary Guidelines” brought to me by the largest snacking experts in the nation, Frito-Lay, who also had a huge booth touting their deceptively-labeled “natural” products, nearby the monstrous booth hosted by parent company PepsiCo.

The risk lies in consuming milk from cows treated with a synthetic, genetically engineered growth hormone called rBGH, and unfortunately, this applies to about one third of the dairy cows in America. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/23/rgbh-in-milk-increases-risk-of-breast-cancer.aspx

A 15 year study showed:
Higher sodium intake was associated with an increase in mortality from all causes.

Higher potassium intake was associated with a lower mortality risk: people with the highest potassium intake had a 61% lower risk of dying from all types of cardiovascular disease and a 74% lower chance of dying from ischemic heart disease (heart disease caused by impaired blood flow, usually a result of atherosclerosis) compared with people with the lowest intake.

Having higher sodium-to-potassium ratios significantly increased the risk of mortality from heart disease. For ischemic heart disease, the risk was more than two times greater among people with the highest sodium-to-potassium ratio than in those with the lowest ratio.