How Many Pus Cells Are In Your Milk?

Written by Charlotte Gerson as featured in Food Matters

Would you feed your child milk if you knew that a glass contained 500 pus cells? 100? 50? Most people answer that they would not accept milk with any pus in it at all for their own children.

We see all kinds of ads, and your pediatrician confirms, that milk is an important nutrient that kids need to grow up and build a strong and healthy body. The well advertised "milk moustache" ad claims that "Milk Does a Body Good." However in the April 10, 2004 issue of Hoard's Dairyman, the National Dairy Farm Magazine, there are reports of the number of pus cells in Californian milk. Pus cells you ask?

It turns out that standard dairy cows are medicated with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to stimulate a much higher than normal milk production. This causes severe stress that results in mastitis, an infection of the udders of sick and stressed cows. This infection is, of course, treated with antibiotics, helping to breed more antibiotic resistant organisms. It is literally unbelievable that one liter (a little over a quart) of Californian milk contained 298 million pus cells in 2003, 11 million more pus cells than it contained in 2002.

You might console yourself by saying "but milk is pasteurized. Surely the cells are cleared!" No, they are not cleared, they are only heated. So your kids drink dead pus cells. There is a slight consolation: some other states' milk contains a much higher pus cell count than California's. Alabama's has an average of 444 million cells; Nevada's has less: ‘only' 443 million; while Florida's milk has the highest count: 548 million pus cells per liter, or nearly 130 million per 8-oz glass. Even that is well below the USDA's allowable U.S. standard of 750 million pus cells per liter, above which milk must be consumed in the state in which it is produced!

Most of the top executives in the USDA come straight out of the cattle industry, and return to lucrative jobs in that industry after their stint in the USDA where they make regulatory rulings favorable to cattlemen, instead of protecting the consumers who pay their salary. So what can you drink instead of milk?

How about fresh carrot juice. Freshly pressed carrot juice from organic carrots contains adequate protein, minerals and necessary nutrients to nourish the body better than milk was ever able to do. At the same time it builds up the immune system and helps the kids to avoid colds and flu. A little centrifugal juicer and some organic carrots will do the trick. And the kids will probably enjoy pressing their juice!

This article was written by Charlotte Gerson of the Gerson Institute as seen in ‘Food Matters'.

Niacin: A Safer Way To Lower Bad Cholesterol?

Half of all Americans are on drugs!: prescription drugs that is.

It's true, says the Associated Press (14 May 2008): "Half of all insured Americans are taking prescription medicines regularly for chronic health problems." That is nothing to be proud of.

Among the very most prescribed of all drugs are those used to lower "bad" LDL cholesterol. Patients taking pharmaceuticals trying to do that are being mistreated. Why? Because niacin (vitamin B-3) in high doses is just as effective, much cheaper, and most importantly, far safer. Niacin raises beneficial HDL levels better than any drug. (1) It also dramatically lowers triglycerides.

The New York Times agrees, saying: "An effective HDL booster already exists. It is niacin, the ordinary B vitamin. Niacin can increase HDL as much as 35 percent when taken in high doses, usually about 2,000 milligrams per day . . . and it has been shown to reduce serum levels of artery-clogging triglycerides as much as 50 percent." The president of the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Steven E. Nissen, said, "Niacin is really it. Nothing else available is that effective." (2)

Indeed, niacin is it. Niacin is cheaper, safer and more effective. (3) So why are cholesterol-lowering drugs pushed anywhere and everywhere? Professor of medicine Dr. B. Greg Brown offered an answer: "If you're a drug company, I guess you can't make money on a vitamin."

One reason why doctors and patients select drugs over vitamins is, said AP, "the pharmaceutical industry's relentless advertising." Indeed, "Americans buy much more medicine per person than any other country . . . The biggest jump in use of chronic medications was in the 20- to 44-year-old age group - adults in the prime of life - where it rose 20 percent over the (last) six years." That is a huge increase.

Even worse than that, now one out of every four children and teenagers is taking a chronic disease drug, usually for depression, asthma, or ADHD. Pushing drug therapy for these conditions is largely based on profit, not health. The value of vitamin therapy for each of these conditions is already well established. (4)

It is time for patients to assert that they are simply not going to accept more and more drugs, at higher and higher prices, with more and more dangerous side effects. It is time to demand the proven but too-long-overlooked alternative: safe and effective nutritional treatment.


References:

(1) Alderman JD, Pasternak RC, Sacks FM, Smith HS, Monrad ES,
Grossman W. Effect of a modified, well-tolerated niacin regimen on
serum total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol and
the cholesterol to high density lipoprotein ratio. Am J Cardiol.
1989 Oct 1;64(12):725-9.

(2) Mason M. NY Times, January 23, 2007. An old cholesterol remedy
is new again.

(3) http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n10.shtml Also
vitamin E: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n01.shtml

(4) Depression: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n11.shtml
Asthma: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n08.shtml
Behavioral disorders: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v03n07.shtml
Research summaries at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml

Source : http://www.orthomolecular.org/

The Truth Behind Farmed Salmon...

It turns out that farm-raised salmon, touted as inexpensive fare for heart-healthy diets, may not be such a good mealtime addition after all. The journal Science published an article detailing an exhaustive analysis of some 700 farm-raised salmon. Most had levels of dioxin-cancer-causing chemicals that are the by-product of various industrial processes-as much as 11 times higher than those found in wild salmon. The best explanation for the big dose of dioxin is that farm-raised fish are eating badly themselves-food pellets mostly derived from ground-up fish. A less-diverse diet than wild salmon eat, it allows concentrations of chemicals to pass easily to farmed salmon.

IT'S THE SALMON FARMS, NOT THE RISKS OF DIOXIN IN FARMED SALMON, THAT WE OUGHT TO BE WORRIED ABOUT.

Farm-raised salmon were largely unheard of 20 years ago. But after getting their start in northern Europe and then spreading to places such as Chile and British Columbia, Canada, "salmon farms" grew rapidly. Today they account for some 60 percent of salmon worldwide-1.4 million metric tons in 2002, which is a lot of salmon steaks. The abundance of farmed salmon has helped make a fish that once was largely a luxury item (or an expensive canned fish) into a commonplace meal in homes and restaurants.

Farmed salmon bring their own set of troubles in their wake. For starters, aquaculture is a dirty industry. As many as 600,000 salmon may be raised in a single net-enclosed pen-itself usually installed in a protected fjord or inlet. Although progressive farmers rotate "crops" of fish between pens, the sea floor under the enclosed salmon becomes covered with fish excrement and uneaten food, creating a dead zone where nothing can live or grow. By some estimates, the salmon farms in British Columbia pump out as much fish faeces as the human equivalent from a city of 500,000.

by Douglas Gantenbein
Source : www.slate.com

The Solution: Ask for wild caught Salmon or Alaskan King Salmon next time you go shopping.

Vitamin C - An Alternative to Chemotherapy?

By Jerome Burne
Medical Health Journalist
As featured in Food Matters

A Check-up six months ago revealed Denis Vaughan's prostate cancer was becoming more active. Vaughan, an orchestral conductor and one of the driving forces behind the creation of the National Lottery, has had prostate cancer for 12 years. Because the tumour wasn't considered aggressive enough for surgery or radiotherapy, his consultant at University College Hospital had agreed on a policy of watchful waiting, while Denis kept it at bay with diet and exercise.

Then, his prostate specific antigen (PSA) score, which measures how active the tumour is, went from 13 to 18.5 'and the watching became a bit anxious'. His oncologist wanted him to take drugs or begin radiotherapy, but Vaughan, who is a strong believer in a natural approach to health, preferred to try a treatment offered by his London GP that involved infusing vitamin C into the bloodstream.

He underwent weekly treatment - with up to 75 grams of vitamin C at a time (the recommended daily amount is 60mg). The treatment, which cost £100 a time, appears to have worked - after seven weeks, his PSA dropped back down to 13, a level described as moderately elevated, and he's back on watchful waiting. His oncologist has said he now doesn't need to see Vaughan for another year.

It's an unorthodox approach, but one that seems to be backed up by research published earlier this month, which found that injecting large amounts of vitamin C into laboratory mice with aggressive and hard-to-treat tumours, caused the cancers to shrink by between 41 and 53 per cent.

Hundreds of patients in the UK have already received IVC as a treatment for cancer - without apparent side-effects. Dr Julian Kenyon, a private GP in Harley Street, says: 'What the American study shows is that when you infuse amounts as high as 4 grams per kilo - the equivalent of around 75 grams for an average adult - vitamin C causes a build up of a chemical called hydrogen peroxide, which destroys the tumour.'

The chief researcher of the American trial, Dr Mark Levine of the American National Institutes of Health, has been investigating vitamin C's cancer killing abilities for several years. He's already shown that it's effective in a test tube and two years ago, he published a report on three patients who were treated for serious and advanced cancers and survived far longer that would normally be expected.

'We now know that the vitamin C gets into tumours in large amounts and that it kills them by causing a build up of hydrogen peroxide. In fact, vitamin C is hardly a new anti-cancer treatment. It was famously used by double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling more than 30 years ago, who found that terminal cancer patients treated with vitamin C lived much longer. However, when his trials were repeated at the prestigious Mayo clinic in America, the researchers found no benefit. Proponents of vitamin C point out the clinic only used oral vitamin C which can work differently.
'This is just the sort of thing that public money should be spent on,' says Dr George Lewith, of the University of Southampton, who assesses complementary and alternative medicines for the National Cancer Research Institute. 'I would be strongly in favour of running a proper clinical trial of IVC as soon as possible.'

Are You Chronically Dehydrated?

"Chronic pains of the body which cannot easily be explained as injury or infection, should first and foremost be interpreted as signals of chronic water shortage in the area where the pain is registered. These pain signals should first be considered and excluded as primary indicators for dehydration of the body before any other complicated procedures are forced on the patient." - Dr F Batmanghelidj

The human body is a bio-electrical water machine that requires a quart a day for every 50 lbs of body weight. The blood alone is made up of a large percentage of watery serum. The lymph fluids which transport waste and nutrients, comprising four times the volume of blood in the body, are made from the water we consume. Every cell that makes us who we are literally owes its life to an adequate supply of fresh, clean water. When the body does not receive a constant, reliable supply of water, it has to ration what is available and cut back on certain functions to make the supply go round. Essential systems like the brain are prioritised, others are impaired or cut back until the brain has decided a reliable source of water has been garnered.

Here's the rub. Most citizens have become chronically and dangerously dehydrated (especially the elderly), since we decided water was too bland to drink and ignored it in favour of tea, coffee, beer, wine, addictive sodas, flavoured water and other chemical-laced water alternatives. A disastrous and dangerous move for the body and society's health in general, to be sure, compounded further since most doctors today cannot readily identify the many water-deficient diseases and associated pains. Thus the underlying dehydration process continues to wreak its havoc while the inevitable drugs given will switch off the warning signals (symptoms).

Consider the following conditions:

Heartburn, arthritis, lupus, asthma, 'high cholesterol', high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer formation, hot flushes and menstrual problems, obesity, allergies, bulimia, chronic fatigue syndrome, ME, angina, lower back pain, gout, kidney stones, skin disorders, diabetes, fungal/yeast overgrowths, multiple sclerosis, allergies, migraine headaches, general aches and pains, morning sickness, depression, heavy/burdensome periods, colitis, dyspepsia, peptic ulcers...

Are all of these conditions linked to a chronic state of dehydration?

World-renowned water expert Dr Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, in his latest bestseller, Water and Salt - Your Healers From Within, maintains that the above conditions are the body's many cries for water, complaints dramatically improved with a consistent and long-term intake of the fresh, clean water. Dr Batman's timely work has helped thousands quash long-term health problems effortlessly and inexpensively. He writes:

"The report of my having successfully treated with water more than three thousand people with symptoms and clinical signs of peptic ulcer disease was published in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology in June 1983. I came away from that experience with the understanding that the people I treated were thirsty, and I uncovered the phenomenon that 'pain' in the body indicates thirst, even though the condition is classified as a disease."

Water is used by the body for digestion, detoxifying cells, watering the lungs, lubricating joints, keeping the body alkalised and a host of cleaning duties. Many warning signals ('symptoms') arise out of the body's inability to neutralise or rid itself of acid, a common enough complaint given the number of antacids sold around the world each day.

'I drink coffee, tea, diet sodas, beer and a host of other liquids. They contain water, don't they?'

This is a common and dangerous misconception. Many of today's designer drinks are diuretic in their effect (water-expelling) because their mostly acidic compositions require the body to give up water and alkalising minerals to eliminate their harmful residues. Diet sodas especially are harmful in that they require large amounts of body-water to neutralise the phosphoric acid component (2.8 pH). Cells that started off healthy and 'plum-like' shrivel to prunes as water, the stuff of life, is progressively denied them. The sick in our hospitals are fed the sodas, tea and coffee they ask for in woeful ignorance of the damage wrought to the micro cell-world within them.

Batmanghelidj's extraordinary work should rightly be considered by a mainstream medical community ever fixated on the drug cure.

Below is a summary of body functions and that rely on an adequate intake of water:

Brain function: The brain comprises 2% of the body's total weight, yet receives 15-20% of the blood supply, mostly comprised of water. Dehydration will affect cognitive ability drastically, and, through histamine's action, can create depressive states (many anti-depressant medications are anti-histamines).
Bone function: Bones require plentiful supplies of water. 75% of the weight of the upper body, for instance, is supported by the water core contained within the fifth lumbar disc, the remaining 25% by muscle fibres around the spine.

Nerve function: Microstreams exist along the length of nerves which transport nutrients and conduct energy along microtubules to the synapses to transmit messages. Dehydration disrupts proper nerve function, resulting in the sensation of pain.

Hydrolysis: Water, far from being an inert solvent, is intricately involved in the body's water-dependent chemical reactions. Lack of water means incomplete or faulty metabolic processes, with obvious implications for continued health and well-being. Proteins and enzymes, for instance, do not function as well in acidic solutions of higher viscosity (stickiness) where the body is dehydrated.
Cellular energy: As water is drawn through the cell membrane, its osmotic flow generates a voltage gradient which can be used in the manufacture of ATP and GTP energy. Dehydration will obviously affect the proper functioning of cells and even kill them.

Histamine: This neurotransmitter plays a major role in activating systems which encourage water intake when dehydration is detected. Functions in the body which consume large quantities of water are cut back, namely the bronchial tubes constricted to cut down on water use in the lungs; increased peristalsis in the bowels to wring more water out of faecal material, and so on. Other signs of histamine's activity, namely allergies, asthma, depression and chronic pains, are interpreted by the physician as 'disease' and treated with anti-histamines, pain-killers (analgesics), etc. Thus the signals of thirst are turned off and the dehydration state continues unabated.
Dyspepsia (heartburn/reflux): Over time, this can lead to ulceration and even cancer. Dr Batmanghelidj recommends that these conditions - also gastritis and duodenitis - be treated with water alone as they are one of the body's major thirst signals. Arrested in his native Iran by the Revolutionary Council during the troubles of the late 1970's, Dr B was confined to Evin prison, Tehran, during which time he successfully treated with water alone over three thousand people complaining of dyspeptic pain and associated symptoms.

Digestion: Requires plentiful supplies of water. The stomach relies on mucus lining the walls to shield it from the effects of the stomach's hydrochloric acid. A bicarbonate solution is produced from the cells in the lining which neutralises any acid attempting to break through the mucus. Water is needed to maintain this effective defence system. Too little water, and the mucus barrier is ineffectual, the acid will penetrate and will lead to pain. Ideally, water should be consumed half an hour before a meal, in time to anticipate the production of digestive acid from glands in the stomach wall.

Ulcers: Often located at the valve between the stomach and duodenum. Said to be caused by curved bacteria known as helicobacters. Yet many people have helicobacters in their small intestine, yet not all of them suffer from ulcers. Histamine-producing nerves are located at this site, which monitor the through-put of acidic food chyme from the stomach into the intestine. Histamine has growth-hormone effects on these micro-organisms, resulting in small intestine bacterial overgrowths (SIBOs). Once again, an adequate regime of water intake will allow all the functions relating to digestion to normalise. Prolonged water intake should therefore be considered before more drastic drug treatments are entered into.

WELCOME TO FOOD MATTERS

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Becoming informed about the choices you have for your health and wellbeing can save your life.

How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

An eye-opening look at aquaculture that does for seafood what Fast Food Nation did for beef. Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, worldwide search for a delicious—and humane—plate of seafood. What he discovered shocked him. From North American Red Lobsters to fish farms and research centers in China, Bottomfeeder takes readers on an illuminating tour through the $55-billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry. Grescoe examines how out-of-control pollution, unregulated fishing practices, and climate change affect what ends up on our plate. More than a screed against a multibillion-dollar industry, however, this is also a balanced and practical guide to eating, as Grescoe explains to readers which fish are best for our environment, our seas, and our bodies. At once entertaining and illuminating, Bottomfeeder is a thoroughly enjoyable look at the world’s cuisines and an examination of the fishing and farming practices we too easily take for granted.