Infographic: Sitting is Killing You

See the entire infographic here

Read an article about a Canadian sitting study here

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Brand/Rebrand: High Fructose Corn Syrup Becomes Corn Sugar

According Tara Parker-Hope of the NY Times (published September 14, 2010):

Would high-fructose corn syrup, by any other name, have sweeter appeal?

The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make the syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient “corn sugar,” arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer confusion about the product.

“Clearly the name is confusing consumers,” said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington-based group, in an interview. “Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.”

According to the market research firm NPD Group, about 58 percent of Americans say they are concerned that high-fructose corn syrup poses a health risk. Some scientists over the years have speculated that high-fructose corn syrup may contribute to obesity by somehow disrupting normal metabolic function, but the research has been inconclusive. As a result, most leading scientists and nutrition experts agree that in terms of health, the effect of high-fructose corn syrup is the same as regular sugar, and that too much of either ingredient is bad for your health.

Marion Nestle, a professor in New York University’s department of nutrition and a longtime food industry critic, says that Americans consume too much of all types of sugar, but that there is no meaningful biochemical difference between table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

“I’m not eager to help the corn refiners sell more of their stuff,” Dr. Nestle wrote in an e-mail. “But you have to feel sorry for them. High-fructose corn syrup is the new trans fat. Everyone thinks it’s poison, and food companies are getting rid of it as fast as they can.”

Read the full article via NY Times’ Well Blog.

Eating too much sugar of any kind is obviously bad for you but there is a recent Princeton study indicating HFCS might be worse. To be fair there is plenty of evidence for both sides of the argument so before you decide to eat food with HFCS in it, do your own research.

In WTF News: Roundup July 15, 2010

Alexaner Kosolapov, “McDonalds Commercial”

RUSSIAN CURATORS ANGER CHURCH, BUT ESCAPE JAIL

Two Russian curators were found guilty Monday of inciting religious hatred in a case that has highlighted the growing influence of the church and its links to the Russian government.

Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev were showered with roses by supporters as a Moscow court cleared them of a maximum jail sentence of three years for their 2007 Forbidden Art exhibit, which mixed religious icons with sexual and pop-culture images.

They must instead pay fines of 200,000 roubles ($6,477) and 150,000 roubles, respectively, to the state. Leading cultural figures had appealed to President Dmitry Medvedev to drop the charges, saying it heralded a new era of censorship.

“I am certain that this decision comes directly from Prime Minister (Vladimir Putin) and President (Medvedev),” Yerofeyev told Reuters when leaving the courtroom to chants and prayers from elderly women…

Russia’s Orthodox Church is undergoing a major revival after the fall of Communism almost 20 years ago and Russia’s leaders have endorsed it as the country’s main faith…

Among the art on display in the 2007 exhibit were works depicting an Orthodox icon adorned with Mickey Mouse, a Russian general raping a soldier, and a Soviet-era Order of Lenin medal over Christ’s head…(Check out some of the artwork here)

The works from the exhibit were placed behind a peep-holed veil so only those who wanted to could view them, and photography was banned to prevent the imagery from being broadly distributed.

Read the full article via Yahoo! News (published July 12, 2010)

Our two cents: What would Russia be without some censorship? Freedom of expression is a beautiful thing, I’m glad we have it here.

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CHEMO THERAPY DRUGS MAY BE GIVING HEALTH CARE WORKERS CANCER

Sue Crump braced as the chemo drugs dripped into her body. She knew treatment would be rough. She had seen its signature countless times in the ravaged bodies and hopeful faces of cancer patients in hospitals where she had spent 23 years mixing chemo as a pharmacist.

At the same time, though, she wondered whether those same drugs — experienced as a form of “secondhand chemo” while she mixed the drugs as a pharmacist at Swedish Medical Center and elsewhere — may have caused her cancer to begin with.

Chemo is poison, by design. It’s descended from deadly mustard gas first used against soldiers in World War I…

Crump, who died of pancreatic cancer in September at age 55, was one of thousands of health-care workers who on the job was chronically exposed to chemotherapy agents for years before there were even voluntary safety guidelines in place. Now some of those workers are being diagnosed with cancers that occupational-health specialists say could be linked to exposure to those same powerful drugs that have saved hundreds of thousands of patient lives.

Studies as far back as the 1970s have linked increased rates of certain cancers to nurses and physicians. Occupational-health experts believe that’s because when nurses, pharmacists, technicians and, increasingly, even veterinarians mix and deliver the drugs, accidental spills, sprays and punctures put them in close, frequent contact with hazardous drugs.

A just-completed study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — 10 years in the making and the largest to date — confirms that chemo continues to contaminate the work spaces where it’s used and in some cases is still being found in the urine of those who handle it, despite knowledge of safety precautions…

Read the full article via The Seattle Times (published July 10, 2010)

Our two cents: Plain and simple, this is just sad.

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THE GULF OF MEXICO IS AWASH IN 27,000 ABANDONED OIL WELLS

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells — those characterized in federal government records as “temporarily abandoned.”

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s — eveb though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.

As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.

Read the full article via AP News on Google (published July 6, 2010)

Our two cents: Nuke them all! Just kidding…our planet is fucked anyway.

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WORKERS CLEAR 1,000 TONS OF FAT FROM LONDON SEWER

Sewer workers have cleared out 1,000 tons of compressed fat and trash from beneath London’s Leicester Square, a tourist hot spot and venue for glitzy movie premieres.

Workers clad in overalls with masks and gloves shoveled out enough gunk to fill nine of London’s iconic double-decker buses, utility Thames Water said in a statement.

“We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale,” said Danny Brackley, a sewer flusher with Thames Water. “We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a 4-foot wall of solid fat.”

The fat is the product of Londoners’ “sewer abuse” — using the water system as general garbage disposal. Particularly troublesome is Londoners’ habit of pouring used cooking oil down the sink. Once in the sewer, the oil cools, congeals and then traps other garbage.

Getting at the goo was not easy. Teams of workers, replete with breathing apparatus to protect them from the rancid smell, had to attack the fat with shovels. They then used water cannons to break down the “fatbergs” inside the sewer…

Read the full article via AOL News (published July 14, 2010)

Our two cents: I just threw up in my own mouth a little

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US DENIES VISA TO AWARD WINNING COLOMBIAN JOURNALIST BECAUSE OF “TERRORIST ACTIVITIES”

The U.S. government has denied a visa to a prominent Colombian journalist who specializes in conflict and human rights reporting to attend a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University.

Hollman Morris, who produces an independent TV news program called “Contravia,” has been highly critical of ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.

The curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, which has offered the mid-career fellowships since 1938, said Thursday that a consular official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota told him Morris was ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the “Terrorist activities” section of the USA Patriot Act.

“We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” said the Nieman curator, Bob Giles. “And Hollman has traveled previously in the United States to give speeches and receive awards.” He said he had written the State Department to ask it to reconsider the decision.

He said the committee had discussed its concerns with State Department officials but was not provided with an explanation…

The 41-year-old Morris, one of 12 foreign journalists admitted to the Nieman program for the 2010-2011 academic year, is among the most controversial chroniclers of Colombia’s long-running leftist insurgency. Among international awards he has received is one from Human Rights Watch in 2007 in which he was praise by Executive Director Kenneth Roth for “courage, an unswerving commitment to justice and genuine concern for the rights of all victims.”

On Feb. 3, 2009, President Uribe called Morris “an accomplice of terrorism” posing as a journalist after Morris showed up with FARC rebels to cover the insurgents’ liberation of four Colombian security force members. Morris was also among journalists, judges and opposition politicians whose phones were illegally tapped by Colombia’s DAS state security agency…

Read the full article via AP News on Google (published July 9, 2010)

Our two cents: Keeping a journalist out of our country because he interviews leftist paramilitary groups while criticizing one of America’s crooked allies is Neo-McCarthyism at its worst.

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Brand/Rebrand: Aspartame Becomes “AminoSweet”

According to Natural News:

“In response to growing awareness about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, what does the manufacturer of one of the world’s most notable artificial sweeteners do? Why, rename it and begin marketing it as natural, of course. This is precisely the strategy of Ajinomoto, maker of aspartame, which hopes to pull the wool over the eyes of the public with its rebranded version of aspartame, called ‘AminoSweet’.

“Over 25 years ago, aspartame was first introduced into the food supply. Today, it is an everyday component of most diet beverages, sugar-free desserts, and chewing gums in countries worldwide. But the tides have been turning as the general public is waking up to the truth about artificial sweeteners like aspartame and the harm they cause to health. The latest aspartame marketing scheme is a desperate effort to indoctrinate the public into accepting the chemical sweetener as natural and safe, despite evidence to the contrary.

“Aspartame was an accidental discovery by James Schlatter, a chemist who had been trying to produce an anti-ulcer pharmaceutical drug for G.D. Searle & Company back in 1965. Upon mixing aspartic acid and phenylalanine, two naturally-occurring amino acids, he discovered that the new compound had a sweet taste. The company merely changed its FDA approval application from drug to food additive and, voila, aspartame was born.

“G.D. Searle & Company first patented aspartame in 1970. An internal memo released in the same year urged company executives to work on getting the FDA into the ‘habit of saying yes’ and of encouraging a ‘subconscious spirit of participation’ in getting the chemical approved.

Read the full article here

posted by: Harold Johns III

In WTF News: Did Drug Firms Make “False H1N1 Claims” in “Organized Panic”?

According to Al Jazeera :
“The severity of the H1N1 outbreak was deliberately exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scare, a leading European health expert has claimed.”

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claims that the threshold for alert was deliberately lowered at the World Health Organization (WHO), allowing a “pandemic” to be declared despite the mildness of the “swine flu.” That designation would force a demand for the vaccine, which was subsequently purchased by governments or health facilities and pushed on the public through a full-scale fear campaign in the media.

Wodarg stated to Al Jazeera that:
“The WHO in collaboration with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, re-defined pandemics and lowered the alarm-threshold. Those new standards forced politicians in most states to react immediately and sign marketing commitments for additional and new vaccines against ‘swine-flu’ and spend billions of dollars to catch up.

“Never before the search for traces of a virus was carried out so broadly and intensively, besides, many cases of death that happen to coincide with seropositive H1N1 lab-findings were simply attributed to ‘swine-flu’ and used to foster fear.”

Now, Wodarg has been backed by members in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) who voted unanimously on his resolution to investigate the matter. An emergency debate has been scheduled to begin later this month.

The Council’s resolution states:
“In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight healthcare resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.”

Could this be why there are  truckloads of vaccines going unused all over the northern hemisphere?

posted by: Harold Johns III