Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Alzheimer's Source? Negative Comments on Vitamin D from My Intelligent Readers

Tags: Genes and High Fructose Corn Sugar, Early and Late Term Alzheimer's Disease, Miracle of Vitamin D?

Charlie Rose moderated another Brain Series with top Scientists in Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel at Columbia. http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10929

Also present was the 91 year old Brenda Milner who made the break-through in treating parietal epilepsy. I was disappointed that she did not mention that those who have this disease often experiences being God or talking to God. Some Republicans?

In any case Professor Scott Small studies at Columbia which came very late in the session when Kandel asked Small to talk a little about his latest break-through! He was reluctant to talk about it, but he did reveal that he thinks that old age late onset Alzheimer's is a synaptic disease as I have often said which attacks a different adjacent part of the Parietal section of the brain than the gene based early onset attacks a cortical section of the brain.

It was Kandel who made made the stupid comment that Alzheimer's involves hundreds of genes! He also repeated the comment that exercise and intellectual thinking was necessary to prevent late-onset Alzheimer's. Brenda Milner with a bright smile who at 91 is sharp as a tack, said she never exercises.

What got me out off my seat was the last comment by Scott Small. He said that early studies indicate that late onset Alzheimer's Disease is due to insulin and sugar, probably high fructose Corn Sugar which results in the production of LDL-2, the deadly low density lipoproteins leading to heart disease and probably Alzheimer's. Normally the protein that so many scientists have condemned as causing Alzheimer's is needed for good health. Only when there is an excess is where the problem lies.

I am still thinking and reading about this implication based on a link generously supplied to me by Geraldine Perry who runs a great website http://www.TheHealthAdvantage.com . Don't forget the The in the address. Just health Advantage will take you to another website.

I will write a blog next week. There is still much to read!

These doubts about the miracle regarding vitamin D are not unusual because it normally takes 17 years for half of the doctors to apply a well proven treatment mode. One habit many intelligent people have adopted is that with so much uncertainty in everything, why not rely on the old tried and true. But the widespread use of sunscreens stopped us from making vitamin D in our skin because it blocked UVA so the old theories are obsolete.
Well, science and medicine advances and the reasons we came to believe that so little vitamin D was good for us is that we are enamored with experts. I am always skeptical, even with Nobel Prize winners in Economics. We got Milton Friedman, Becker, and Greenspan in the mess we are in today.

I was quite shocked that my doctors have agreed with me without having to twist their arms, once I gave them the facts. I guess I am lucky picking very good doctors by challenging them in my first encounter and see how the react. One doctor in New Jersey threw me out of the office after I questioned his conclusions about a treatment. He was once the head of the Medical Society in New Jersey! Politicians often make poor doctors.

My primary care doctor did not think early in 2009 that President Obama will be able to pass healthcare. I was more optimistic because of his past ability to convince right Wing Republicans at the Harvard Review to vote for him for head of the Harvard Review! He even convinced a staunch conservative Professor whose book he reviewed to give him a position teaching Constitutional Law in the Free Market School in Chicago!

Bill Moyers showed how to talk to liberals who hate the Healthcare Bill, one at The Nation magazine, Nichols, and the other at Harvard. He just simply asked them what is good about the bill? Both were eating out of Bill's hand by the end of the session!

One advantage I think I had over many very Ph.D. bright scientists and engineers from Ivy League Schools is that I had more common sense and think intuitively to solve almost every problem I have in science and in life, being careful to gather enough information to make full use of my intuitive abilities.

Two intuitive Economists, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz Nobel Prize winners in Economics are unusual because they have both common sense and an intuitive mind. they have common sense and think very well intuitively. I suspect many Nobel Prize winners are able to think intuitively, but don't admit that.

The Chicago Economists including Obama's advisor tend to think in how many of us think. We select what supports our beliefs in all we read, hear, and see and reject and forget contrary arguments, no matter how good. I know this so I try to fight hard to give the opposite side of Tracks a serious consideration. I read serious conservative books and magazines and columnist such as David Brooks.

Powerful Intuitive Thinking: Most scientists who made huge breakthroughs in science and other endeavors such as Gladwell got their theory intuitively by being able to correlate disparate information which often seem contradictory to just a logical mind. Einstein was a powerful intuitive thinker.

In contrast, most Americans do poorly in gut intuitive thinking based on very little information in their brain which was illustrated in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, who has come up with "obvious" correlations once he has announced them. He was describing an expert in painting forgeries who knew immediately that a painting was a fake, but did not know how he came to that conclusion which unfortunately Gladwell emphasizes this later in the book.

Most readers missed this key point including book reviewers who really don't read very much of the book they review except for reviewers like Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times and Washington Post's Michael Dirda and Ron Charles. She has wonderful reviews on fiction, but her conservatism shows when she reviews political books.

I started becoming interested in vitamin D when I became aware that our body can produce up to 22,000 IU of Vitamin D in our skin by just 15-30 minutes in the sun about 3-4 years ago and started following the medical and scientific literature. I was simply shocked that practically no publications were available. I guess no one was interested in studying the effects of cheap vitamin D, especially Big Pharma and Academics who gets funding from the government only which had been cut drastically by George W. Bush.

Bush also stopped the importation of a French Sunscreen long approved and used in Europe and Canada. I could not convince my fellow researchers not to use sunscreen in their skin formulations, but I failed. Everyone uses sunscreen now in skin cream, most without UVA protection.

I knew then that UVA, the longer wavelength UV radiation from the sun gets through the surface skin and activates melanin or tanning element. Although very few want to say it or studied it, melanoma results from the mutation of melanin to cause melanoma. Finally in November 2006, Bush allowed the French product into the USA because American companies has produced an adequate substitute UVA. But the three good ones are not the ones that most Americans are using. Google ABC news and Sunscreens. When I looked after I saw the program on ABC, the corporate press/media ignored the implication. I am sure McCain was using the popular sunscreens which led to recurrent melanoma on his face. Maybe someone or his doctor let him know the best sunscreens to use with UVA protection.

At Brigham Young University in Utah, scientists have started a double blind study which will take decades, I assume, to complete. What has been done so far are studies of many people who get diseases and check their vitamin D use. A sophisticated statistical analysis taking into account contrary factors to make all patients as alike as possible. I do not know if they looked at the correlation between the heavy use of UVB sunscreens on general health.

I read in the 1980s when heavy use of sunscreens started in places like sunny Australia. Melanoma mushroomed including Sweden! The smart Swedish scientists assumed it was the sunscreen use.

The Australians scientists where some of the first to start correlating Melanoma to sunscreens. Australian has lots of Irish which were exiled there by the British Empire a couple of years ago. Those who used no sunscreens except a shirt and a hat in one province had very low melanoma rates while a province with heavy sunscreen use cholecalciferol (pronounced koh·luh·kal·sif·uh·rawl) in the skin is the single most important fact every person should know about vitamin D—a fact that has profound implications for the natural human condition.Technically not a "vitamin," vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that targets over 2000 genes (about 10% of the human genome) in the human body. Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more. Vitamin D's influence on key biological functions vital to one's health and well-being mandates that vitamin D no longer be ignored by the health care industry nor by individuals striving to achieve and maintain a greater state of health.

If well adults and adolescents regularly avoid sunlight exposure, research indicates a necessity to supplement with at least 5,000 units (IU) of vitamin D daily. To obtain this amount from milk one would need to consume 50 glasses. With a multivitamin more than 10 tablets would be necessary. Neither is advisable.The skin produces approximately 10,000 IU vitamin D in response 20–30 minutes summer sun exposure—50 times more than the US government's recommendation of 200 IU per day!

HOW TO GET ENOUGH VITAMIN D

There are 3 ways for adults to insure adequate levels of vitamin D:
  • regularly receive midday sun exposure in the late spring, summer, and early fall, exposing as much of the skin as possible (being careful to never burn).
  • regularly use a sun bed (avoiding sunburn) during the colder months.
  • take 5,000 IU per day for 2–3 months, then obtain a 25-hydroxyvitamin D test. Adjust your dosage so that blood levels are between 50–80 ng/mL (or 125–200 nM/L) year-round.

VITAMIN D'S CO-FACTORS

Vitamin D has co-factors that the body needs in order to utilize vitamin D properly. They are:
  • magnesium
  • zinc
  • vitamin K2
  • boron
  • genestein
  • a tiny amount of vitamin A

Magnesium is the most important of these co-factors. In fact, it is common for rising vitamin D levels to exacerbate an underlying magnesium deficiency. If one is having problems supplementing with vitamin D, a magnesium deficiency could be the reason why.

Read more about vitamin D's co-factors!

PARTICIPATE IN OUR VITAMIN D TESTING STUDY!

As I said in our last newsletter, the Vitamin D Council is attempting to compare vitamin D blood test results of Quest and LabCorp. We are willing to pay your costs, up to $100.00, once we get copies of both tests results, drawn on the same day, and your receipts.
To participate, you need to find a doctor or clinic in your area that uses Quest and call your doctor and arrange for a 25-hydroxy-vitamin D blood test done by Quest. This will cost anywhere from $50 to $150 dollars.
In the meantime, you will need to arrange to have your blood tested by LabCorp the same day. Thus, you will be having your blood drawn twice on the same day, one sample sent to Quest and the other sample sent to LabCorp.
The easiest and cheapest way to arrange for the LabCorp test is through Life Extension Foundation, who emailed me to help the Council out with this study. Just call 1-800-544-4440 and let the operator know you are ordering this test in conjunction with the Vitamin D Council study. The price will be $35.25 for the LabCorp 25(OH)D test through Life Extension; this price is only for those participating in this study.
This will be an ongoing study in which those interested may participate anytime within the next year, beginning in March 2010.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Real Change Came with Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965: Why So Apoplectic Now?

Tags: Why Americans So Apoplectic About New Healthcare Bill?, Propaganda?, Fear?, Change?

Is it the fear that giving to the poorer half of the mostly darker, but plenty of light faces population or 150,000,000 Americans life-saving healthcare and eliminating the ability of the Insurance companies from denying care if we get sick and not permitting insurance companies to not insure anyone with pre-existing conditions which will probably include a majority of us once we get over age 40?

It is certainly not about taxes because only the top 2 percent are being taxed and only the million plus income families get a significant tax bitePublish Post of less than a 2% tax increase. It is certainly not about contributing to the deficits because the Congressional Budget Office did not count the part of the bill which has the potential to bring out huge savings in both Medicare and insurance in general while at the same time significantly improving the healthcare given to everyone. Still in the second ten years, the CBO predicts a trillion dollars in savings!

Could it be that because the top one percent has taken so much away from the rest of us in the last 30 years, we feel very insecure about our own financial and health future? Or is it the lies that Republicans have repeated so often that even intelligent people have fallen for them?

That is how propaganda works as the Nazi propagandist found using the book from a Jewish nephew of Sigmund Freud, the British Edward Bernays who wrote the 1928 book "Propaganda" which Hitler read while in prison is really worth reading because we get so much in the press/media that no one seems to know the real truths. "Trust Us We're Experts," is also well worth reading because they give us examples of how the press/media makes us stupid!

Jim Kawakami, 3/30/2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

... But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?src=me&ref=general

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

Published: March 27, 2010

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?src=me&ref=general


Monday, March 29, 2010

Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction

Tags: Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism ... , Barry C. Lynn, Reagan and Univ Chicago Economics Made Our Lives Much Worse

Since 1980 at the start of Reagan Era, the full force of the Chicago Style School of Economics has led to the transfer of wealth from the Middle-Class to the Top One Percent. Profits trumped morals, laws, and regulations. They even removed information that contradicted what they lied about in the EPA and probably many others. We still have not discovered all the crimes on People that Bush and his gang perpetrated on all of us. Bush has reduced the budget every year for Medicare so many doctors dropped Medicare patients or did not take them. But he was happy to give us Medicare D to reward Big Pharma, but as in the Wars and this bill, he did not pay for it. He Also did not pay for his trillion dollar tax cuts!

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS:

Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"

by Stephen Lendman
Thursday, 4 March 2010

Without antitrust enforcement, monopolies now run America. It will take more than a lawsuit or two to overthrow America's corporatist oligarchy and restore a model of capitalism that protects our rights as property holders and citizens.

Lynn is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of "Too Big to Fail" about the dangers of monopoly capitalism.

He expands on the threat in his newest book titled, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction," explaining today's peril given the power of predatory giants.

They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.

Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tryannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked "weapons of mass destruction." ... http://baltimorechronicle.com/2010/030410Lendman.shtml

Barry C. Lynn http://www.booktv.org/search.aspx?For=Cornered last night on C-Span 2 gave a harrowing account of Reagan ignoring anti-Trust laws, as did Clinton and the Two Bushes has completely changed the economic landscape of America where monopolies now control the pricing of everything we buy. The Chicago School of Economics was implemented to make us a Consumer Society where we gain status by buying more and more and larger and larger homes and second and third homes to flaunt their wealth and affluence.

Essentially one firm controls the eye glasses industry! Of course they keep the names of the many businesses they acquired by force. One auto parts manufacturer controls all the business! As we all know mergers kill jobs, unions, extensive firing of people is done, and no incentive to improve their products or hire more people because they control the market by themselves or through illegal collusion, sometimes openly. If employees threaten or complain about the low pay and low opportunities.

Of course they also hire the best and brightest psychologists and public relation propagandists to control our thoughts as in Orwell's 1984, but considerably more efficient and widespread. We have seen this in spades during the passage of the Healthcare Bill and the post Healthcare Bill period. Now the Healthcare Insurance Industry is arguing that the bill passed does not force them to allow children with pre-existing conditions into their plan!

Seniors in Florida are strongly against the Healthcare Bill. Most are too ignorant about too much healthcare and procedures which have killed Medicare patients according the Dartmouth Study on millions of Medicare Patients with comparable similar illnesses. The book "Overtreated" by Sharon Brownlee, a Health Journalist for 30 plus years, has an exceptional coverage of all the horror stories.

As we have seen in the Food Producer Industry controlled by Big four American and one German corporation who have no compunction or regret about what they have done to the American Families who now struggle to survive. Yes, half of our families make less than $50,000/year where even in lower cost Oregon, it takes $48,000 just for basic necessities such as lodging, food, and everyday needs.

Yes, they go to cheap fast food restaurants and get obese from high Fructose Corn Sugar provided by the Big Four. Cane sugar helps satiate our appetite, but Fructose does not. Fructose is a poison where 30 percent are converted to deadly LDL-2, the heavy fat which causes
plaque and increases our triglycerides.

The ratio of HDL/Triglycerides is a better indicator of Heart Health because it takes into account LDL-2 which leads to Triglycerides but cannot be tested separately from good LDL-1. Today on MSNBC, it was reported that the contents in Fast Food is addictive because it has a liberal combination of sugar, salt, and saturate fats. Only a handful of stuff sold at McDonalds do not contain High Fructose Corn Syrup Sugar. If the label does not say Cane Sugar, it is the Deadly Sugar.

It is unbelievable, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not allowed to regulate chronic poisons in food! The Robber Barons controlled the Supreme Court in 1906 when the law was first implemented.


... The 1906 Food and Drug Act and creation of the FDA

In June 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Food and Drug Act, also known as the "Wiley Act" after its chief advocate.[20] The Act prohibited, under penalty of seizure of goods, the interstate transport of food which had been "adulterated", with that term referring to the addition of fillers of reduced "quality or strength", coloring to conceal "damage or inferiority," formulation with additives "injurious to health," or the use of "filthy, decomposed, or putrid" substances. The act applied similar penalties to the interstate marketing of "adulterated" drugs, in which the "standard of strength, quality, or purity" of the active ingredient was not either stated clearly on the label or listed in the United States Pharmacopoeia or the National Formulary. The act also banned "misbranding" of food and drugs.[21] The responsibility for examining food and drugs for such "adulteration" or "misbranding" was given to Wiley's USDA Bureau of Chemistry.[20]
Wiley used these new regulatory powers to pursue an aggressive campaign against the manufacturers of foods with chemical additives, but the Chemistry Bureau's authority was soon checked by judicial decisions, as well as by the creation of the Board of Food and Drug Inspection and the Referee Board of Consulting Scientific Experts as separate organizations within the USDA in 1907 and 1908 respectively. A 1911 Supreme Courtdecision ruled that the 1906 act did not apply to false claims of therapeutic efficacy,[22] in response to which a 1912 amendment added "false and fraudulent" claims of "curative or therapeutic effect" to the Act's definition of "misbranded." However, these powers continued to be narrowly defined by the courts, which set high standards for proof of fraudulent intent.[20] In 1927, the Bureau of Chemistry's regulatory powers were reorganized under a new USDA body, the Food, Drug, and Insecticide organization. This name was shortened to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) three years later.[23] ...




President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the new Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) into law on June 24, 1938. The new law significantly increased federal regulatory authority over drugs by mandating a pre-market review of the safety of all new drugs, as well as banning false therapeutic claims in drug labeling without requiring that the FDA prove fraudulent intent. The law also authorized factory inspections and expanded enforcement powers, set new regulatory standards for foods, and brought cosmetics and therapeutic devices under federal regulatory authority. This law, though extensively amended in subsequent years, remains the central foundation of FDA regulatory authority to the present day.[20] ...

CRITICISMS OF FDA

Nine FDA scientists appealed to then president-elect Barack Obama over pressures experienced during the George W. Bush presidency, from management to manipulate data, including in relation to the review process for medical devices. Characterized as "corrupted and distorted by current FDA managers, thereby placing the American people at risk," These concerns were also highlighted in the 2006 report[41] on the agency as well.[43]
A recent analysis of the economic discourse regarding certain FDA-administered restrictions finds that published statements by economists very preponderantly support liberalization. The three FDA restrictions under analysis are the permitting of new drugs and devices, the control of manufacturer speech, and the imposition of prescription requirements. Additionally, some economists have argued that in the increasingly complex and diverse food marketplace, the FDA is not equipped to adequately regulate or inspect food.[44]
However, when asking the question whether economists or fundamental economic reasoning favor liberalization of the restrictions, the consensus is disagreement. Economist Daniel Klein suggests, "taboos surround the issue, particularly taboos against the critical examination of fundamentals." He contends, "that there is no market-failure rationale for the restrictions.” Many economists that publish statements regarding the FDA "exhibit a sort of intellectual schizophrenia. In their heart of hearts, they seem to agree that there is no respectable market-failure rationale." Perhaps, certain factors surrounding the political and sociological culture of the regulations keep some economists from speaking openly.[45] ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration

Note that George W. Bush put lobbyists at the head of Regulatory Agencies including the SEC and FDA. Drugs approved by Bush's FDA has killed tens of thousands including Vioxx and Diabetes Drugs.

Jim Kawakami, Mar 29, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

PS: I strongly urge you to watch this one hour video!