Health Videos and Health News // Current

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29 days ago

Prayer Treatment in your Healthcare Bill?

"A little-noticed measure would put Christian Science healing sessions on the same footing as clinical medicine. Critics say... more

DeliaTheArtist
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"When delegates from 192 nations arrive in Copenhagen in December for the UN COP15 summit, they will confront a 181-page draft negotiation text, 2,000 bracketed passages still in dispute, and just 11 days in which to come to some sort of consensus. To power them through these discussions, Denmark has promised a smorgasbord of ecologically minded fare: All water will be tap (not bottled), tea and coffee will be fair trade, and the food menu will be no less than 65 percent organic.

Though undoubtedly well-intentioned, this last provision is troubling, but not because anyone really cares about the provenance of Ban Ki-Moon’s turnip greens. Rather, it suggests a willful and dangerous ignorance about the tenuous state of global agriculture, and the prospects for feeding 9 billion people while also addressing biodiversity loss, water shortage, and, yes, climate change. Organic foods are enjoying skyrocketing popularity in the US and Europe, as are their ill-defined sidekicks, “natural,” “whole,” and “real” foods. Yet popular notions that these foods—and the agriculture that begets them—are at once better for people and for the planet turn out to be largely devoid of experimental support. Worse still, “organophilia” tends to go hand-in-hand with technophobic skepticism towards the very sorts of scientific approaches most likely to supercharge an ailing food system while leaving our planet intact.

No one can argue with the merits of paying more heed to where our suppers come from. At its best, the organic movement is about reacquainting ourselves with the origins of food—appreciating that chicken is an animal and not just a shrink-wrapped package in the refrigerator case.

Unfortunately, what may have begun as a revolt against fake food or, for many, the horrors of concentrated animal feed lots, has given way to a culture that increasingly fetishizes organic, natural, and whole foods with little agreement on what such terms even mean, outside of an emphatic devotion to what they are not: They aren’t in any way related to industrial-scale farms or big-box grocery chains; chemical herbicides or pesticides; biotechnology or its subgenre, genetic engineering. And by those criteria, they are deemed to be safer, more nutritious, and less damaging to the environment.

Closer scrutiny of these assumptions, however, reveals little to back them up. As Michael Specter points out in his forthcoming book, Denialism, mercury, lead, and asbestos are “natural” too, as are E. coli and salmonella. In 2009, a salmonella outbreak killed nine people, sickened hundreds, and triggered the largest food recall in US history. Meanwhile, genetically engineered products, despite having been on the market for more than 13 years, haven’t sickened anyone, Specter says. Nutritionally, there is no clear evidence that organic foods trump conventional ones. In one recent study, researchers funded by Denmark’s International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems compared kale, peas, potatoes, and apples grown organically with those grown according to conventional guidelines. They also fed both organic and conventional produce to rats for two years. “Overall, there was no evident trend towards differences in element content of foodstuffs or diets due to the use of different cultivation systems,” they concluded in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

For us “foodies,” now is the time for some deep soul-searching, to decide whether we will allow ideology to win out over evidence, particularly when the goals of biotech are increasingly aligned with many of the values the organic community allegedly holds dear. In the meantime, let us hope that in between sessions, those food summit officials venture out to sample plenty of local Roman fare, unlike the Copenhagen contingent, which will be served a pseudoscientific view of what sustainable food looks like."

I know it's a lot, but LOTS more at the link! http://tr.im/DXP0"When delegates from 192 nations arrive in Copenhagen in December for the UN COP15 summit, they will confront a 181-page... more

DeliaTheArtist
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30 days ago

Dr. Nancy adorable but ... oh oh insider trading? Not cute when people trust you with their lives..?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Snyderman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Snyderman In 1999, Snyderman returned over... more

CarolynGillis
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2 comments

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30 days ago

Stigma part of breast cancer's grip on poor

Nurses were training women in rural Mexico to examine their breasts for cancer when one raised her hand to object. If she lost her... more

xiola
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30 days ago

FDA won't accept Merck's application for new drug

U.S. regulators won't accept drugmaker Merck's application for a new combination cholesterol pill that includes rival... more

xiola
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2 comments

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30 days ago

Enter Your Active Lifestyle Tips & You Could Win $1,000!

How do you live your best active life? Enter you active lifestyle tips and you could win $1000! Do you run, bike, swim? Are you... more

Dorothee
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30 days ago

Tamiflu and Swine Flu Vaccine Patient Comments of permanent and serious side effects.

Please spread the word. More and more of us are not falling for this scam.

CarolynGillis
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19 comments

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30 days ago

Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical".

How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind.

But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests - still the predominant measure of people's cognitive abilities - do not effectively tap into it. "IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of 'good thinking'."

Read the full article here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?full=trueIS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent... more

retro_Syl
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38 comments

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1 month ago

10 Common Myths About Bipolar Disorder

Through diligence and understanding, those suffering from mental illnesses can overcome the arbitrary restrictions society places... more

eva2
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1 month ago

Med, nursing schools teaching alternative remedies

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Medical Writer EDITOR'S NOTE: Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures from... more

xiola
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1 month ago

'ER' star runs marathon for cause

Whether you hail from the era of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Top Gun," or "ER" you might... more

knews121
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1 month ago

Weed Marijuana Legalized? High Times Soon? RESPOND!

CkhID
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2 comments

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1 month ago

Cheerleader Gets A Flu Shot & Now She Can Only Walk Backwards!

This is ubelieveably sad and utterly astounding. Poor woman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScGC7nFDxM&feature=player_embedded

xiola
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22 comments

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1 month ago

Drugs advisor: Alcohol more harmful than LSD

The Government's chief advisor on drugs policy, Professor David Nutt has said that alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than... more

unimatrix0
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4 comments

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1 month ago

Health Care Reform Bill includes menu labeling for chain restaurants

Part of the 1,990 page health care reform bill introduced by Nancy Pelosi yesterday (October 29th, 2009) includes a new mandate... more

unimatrix0
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2 comments

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1 month ago

BPA Safer Than Contraceptives In Rat Study

The plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) may not be so bad after all, according to results from a new animal study funded by the... more

ajrmy
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2 comments

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1 month ago

Blue Shield Shut Down by Protesters

200 protesters, 40 sit-in activists risking arrest and 30 others who blocked entrances, shut down Blue Shield in San Francisco... more

JonRaymond
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1 month ago

Barack Obama lifts HIV/AIDS US travel ban

Barack Obama said that a US travel ban against people infected with the HIV virus will be overturned early next year.

The order will be completed on Monday, Obama said, finishing a process begun during the administration of George Bush.

The United States is one of about a dozen countries that bar entry to travellers based on their HIV status. The ban has been in place for more than 20 years. Obama said it will be lifted just after the new year, after a waiting period of about 60 days.

"If we want to be a global leader in combating HIV/Aids, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/Aids programme. Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a million Americans with HIV or Aids, mostly low-income people.

The bill is named for an teenager who contracted Aids through a blood transfusion at age 13. Ryan White went on to fight Aids-related discrimination against him and others like him in the late 1980s and to help educate Americans about the disease. He died in April 1990 aged 18.

His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several members of Congress and HIV/Aids activists.

In 1987, at a time of widespread fear and ignorance about HIV, the department of health and human services added the disease to the list of communicable diseases that disqualified a person from entering the United States.

The department tried in 1991 to reverse its decision but was opposed by Congress, which in 1993 went the other way and made HIV infection the only medical condition explicitly listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the country.

The law effectively has kept out thousands of students, tourists and refugees and complicated the adoption of children with HIV. No major international Aids conference has been held in the United States since 1993 because HIV-positive activists or researchers could not enter the country.

Obama said lifting the ban "is a step that will save lives" by encouraging people to get tested and to get treatment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/30/obama-ends-hiv-travel-banBarack Obama said that a US travel ban against people infected with the HIV virus will be overturned early next year. The order... more