One for Your Spirit

Note: I didn't write this story, but I felt it's message and wanted to share it with you. Here's one for your spirit:

I grew up with practical parents. A mother, God love her, who washed aluminum foil after she cooked in it, then reused it. She was the original recycle queen, before they had a name for it. And a father who was happier getting old shoes fixed than buying new ones.

Their marriage was good, their dreams focused. Their best friends lived barely a wave away. I can see them now, Dad in trousers, tee shirt and a hat and Mom in a housedress, lawn mower in one hand, and dish-towel in the other.

It was the time for fixing things....a curtain rod, the kitchen radio, screen door, the oven door, the hem in a dress. Things we keep. It was a way of life, and sometimes it made me crazy -- All that re-fixing, eating, renewing -- I wanted just once to be wasteful. Waste meant affluence. Throwing things away meant you knew there'd always be more.

But then my mother died, and on that clear summer's night, in the warmth of the hospital room, I was struck with the pain of learning that sometimes there isn't any more. Sometimes, what we care about most gets all used up and goes away, never to return. So, while we have it, it's best we

love it, and care for it, and fix it when it's broken, and heal it when it's sick.

This is true. for marriage, and old cars, and children with bad report cards. and dogs with bad hips, and aging parents and grandparents. We keep them because they are worth it -- because we
are worth it. Some things we keep. Like a best friend that moved away or a classmate we grew up with. There are just some things that make life important, like people we know who are special.....and so, we keep them close.

Good friends are like stars -- You don't always see them, but you know they are always there. Keep them close!

Vitamin D Prevents Cancer and Autoimmune Disease

A new study out of Oxford University pinpoints vitamin D deficiency as a culprit in serious illnesses like cancer and autoimmune disorders. According to the report, which was recently published online in the journal Genome Research, genetic receptors throughout the body need adequate vitamin D levels to prevent these and other serious illnesses from developing.

Multiple sclerosis, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Chron's disease, leukemia -- these and many more diseases are often caused by a lack of vitamin D. Your genes literally have receptors that need vitamin D in order to properly express themselves. If there is not enough of the vitamin, serious illness is prone to develop.

The Oxford team made specific observations about the importance of vitamin D in the genome regions associated with autoimmune diseases and cancer, noting that the nutrient is absolutely vital in helping to prevent these diseases from forming.

"Considerations of vitamin D supplementation as a preventative measure for these diseases are strongly warranted," expressed Sreeram Ramagopalan, author of the study.

However, current recommendations for vitamin D intake are unacceptably low, and many nations are considering updating their guidelines. The U.S. Institute of Medicine, for example, recommends getting a mere 200 to 600 international units (IU) of vitamin D a day, an amount far too low to have much therapeutic effect.

Since summer sun exposure creates about 20,000 IU of vitamin D in the skin in just 15 minutes, supplementation with at least 5,000 to 10,000 IU of vitamin D daily, particularly during the winter, is preferable. Healthy blood levels of vitamin D are somewhere between 50 and 80 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml), so many natural health professionals recommend having a "25 OH Vitamin D" blood test performed to check these levels.

Sources:

http://www.naturalnews.com/029605_vitamin_d_prevention.html

You're Not Finished Until You Floss

Flossing plays an important role in daily oral hygiene for a number of reasons. Careful flossing reaches the areas between teeth to remove debris, plaque, and bacteria that lodge there. The thin nylon filament of which floss is made is ideal for the hard-to-clean spots that the toothbrush bristles cannot reach.

Proper flossing means wrapping the filament around each tooth and working it in an up-and-down motion as it hugs the tooth. This action removes not only tiny bits of food that the toothbrush cannot, it also tackles bacteria that congregate there, harden, and becomes crusty calculus or the tartar build up. When these bacteria aren't removed and plaque forms, it can cause the gums to become inflamed and bleed, resulting in gingivitis, the first stage of gum disease. Untreated, gum disease can lead to damage to the supporting bone and eventually to tooth loss. Prevention of gum disease isn't the only reason to make flossing part of your daily oral-hygiene routine. Bacteria that hide between teeth can cause interproximal decay, which can affect more than one tooth at a time.

In addition to helping prevent gum disease and cavities, flossing removes bacteria and leftover bits of food that can cause bad breath. Diabetics and those afflicted with heart disease have special reasons to floss. Regularly removing bacteria by flossing can reduce the risk of endocarditis -- which can cause the heart to become inflamed. diabetics, because they heal more slowly, should be sure to floss scrupulously.

OC

Healthy and Safe Amalgam Removal Procedure

Biocompatible Resin Replacement

When you decide to have your dental amalgams (silver fillings) removed, it's important to see a specially trained holistic/biological dentist who is trained in proper removal. Here's what to look for:

To prevent mercury and other metals from being ingested, use a flexible shield that comfortably fits in your mouth so you can relax your jaw during removal. The shield protects the throat, illuminates the mouth, and creates double suction to keep the amalgam localized.

Pure oxygen for you to breathe during the procedure.

High speed suction that literally pulls the amalgam out of your mouth as it is released from the tooth.

Specialized drill bit (at low speed) is used to very rapidly release the amalgam.

Throughout the process, copious water is used to rinse and remove amalgam.

To promote healing, oral health, and comfort, some dentists also use a chlorella rinse, administer Bach Flower Remedies, and utilize aromatherapy products.

OC

Help Us Reach Our Goal -- Ban Dental Mercury!

Make your electronic 'voice' heard at the UNEP meeting in Tokyo, January 2011.

You aren't required to live in California to sign the petition. As a matter of fact, you'll see many people who've already signed the petition don't live in California --- which tells us that people all over the world have been sickened from mercury amalgam (silver fillings).

Join us! Click and sign here:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/ban-dental-mercury/

Thank you for your support.

OC

EU Food Supplement Clampdown Overrides Consumer Choice --- We, the People, Can't Allow This to Happen in the US

EU food-supplement clampdown overrides consumer choice

August 19, 2010

WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug. 19, 2010/ Troy Media/ –

In 2011, hundreds of food supplements and thousands of health-benefit claims concerning food supplements will be banished from the European market as each European Union member state enforces the EU Supplements Directive of 2002.

That administrative rule is one of the Western world’s most extensive experiments in centralized government planning. By order of the European Food Safety Authority, as confirmed by the European Commission, the nations of Europe will dutifully dispatch their health investigators and police to remove from the market hundreds of food supplements consumed for decades without serious complaint.

Companies forced to downsize or close

Those agents will force the downsizing or closure of a number of companies that have manufactured and distributed the banned products, particularly small to medium-size businesses. The agents will also censor health information in ways more sweeping (reaching health claims made in all 27 member states) than the dreaded English Licensing of the Press Act of 1662.

The food supplement market in Western Europe is estimated to have an annual value of approximately US$80 billion. About 40 per cent of the adult population of Europe use dietary supplements daily, varying in kind preferred and in level of interest by country. Increasingly, Europeans have come to associate above-recommended daily intake of certain vitamins and minerals with beneficial health effects, causing them to depend on access to those products as part of a personal health regimen.

Countries seriously affected

Certain countries in Europe already suffering from high unemployment rates, such as Spain (near 20 per cent), Ireland (13 per cent), Portugal (10 per cent) and Greece (9.2 per cent), stand to suffer the most from unemployment resulting from the EU crackdown on supplements and supplement claims.

The directive has empowered that bureaucratic scientific body - the Safety Authority - to stand between those who make and distribute food supplements and European consumers, and to dictate which products previously lawfully available may henceforth be allowed to reach consumers and what may henceforth be said about them. Its aim is to render uniform the entire European market, despite the great diversity in food-supplement preferences that exist among the peoples of Europe.

The system discriminates against small companies and new market entrants in favor of large companies and incumbent sellers because it presumes all products sold without incident to be unlawful unless proven – based on clinical trial evidence – to be safe and bioavailable. Proof, in the form of scientific dossiers, must establish to EFSA’s satisfaction that products intended for sale are safe and bioavailable. No claims may henceforth be made unless scientific dossiers establish to EFSA’s satisfaction that the claims are proven to a near conclusive degree. The dossiers are expensive, roughly[B1] US$500,000 or more per submission. At least 90 per cent of the companies in this market cannot afford to submit a dossier and so must either cease sales altogether or reduce product offerings to those that others succeed in getting approved.

EFSA, a draconian taskmaster

To date, EFSA has proven itself a draconian taskmaster. Of some 800 dossiers for food-supplement approval that have been submitted, almost 80 per cent haven’t been approved by the agency. Unless a food supplement is placed on EFSA’s list of approved supplement ingredients, it is unlawful to sell. That method reversed the prior burden of proof. Before the EU Supplements Directive, if a product was derived from food, it was presumed safe unless a government in Europe established the product to be adulterated (i.e., to be unsafe for human consumption). Since the EU Supplements Directive, every food supplement is presumed unsafe, regardless of its prior history of safe use, unless scientifically established to EFSA’s satisfaction to be safe and bioavailable.

Proof of safety and bioavailability has proven to be a catch-22 in EFSA’s Kafkaesque system of risk reviews. If a food supplement could be unsafe at some dose level (a truism for everything in nature, including water), then it is presumed unsafe at every dose level unless a dossier proves safety at a particular dose level. In addition, if a food supplement has an effect on the body (true for almost every food supplement and dependent on dose), then if that biological effect can be linked to some potential adverse event it becomes an impermissible dose. In the end, this system reduces dosages for food supplements to levels of inactivity, making them largely useless as aids to health, undermining entirely the market for these products by eliminating them except at dose levels that have no beneficial health benefits.

To date, EFSA has also been an effective censor. Of some 9,000 health-claim dossiers filed, EFSA has acted on only 1,080. EFSA says it will act in September on the remainder still on file. Its rulings have generally been negative, condemning nearly every claim for probiotic products, antioxidants, even omega-3 fatty acids. Claims not supported by proof to a near-conclusive degree are rejected.

Although almost no science, including nutrition science, is ever provable conclusively, EFSA condemns all nutrition science that accurately reflects the extent to which a nutrient may affect health on the illogical presumption that science is false unless conclusively proven true.

In the real world of science, information exists on a continuum between a bare hypothesis and a proposition that is proven, with most existing in the realm between the two, backed by credible evidence that links the nutrient to an effect on health and disease, albeit inconclusively.

EU fails to disclose information

Consumers depend on credible science that is inconclusive in making daily purchasing decisions. Indeed, they depend on inconclusive science to make critical, life-affecting decisions in the market – everything from which car to buy to what drug to take. Uniquely, the EU has chosen to keep from consumers all less-than-conclusive information about nutrients potential to cause illness or disease. In this way, the EU is dumbing down the European marketplace for food supplements, robbing Europeans of essential information on emerging science and the potential of certain nutrients to reduce disease and improve health.

Ironically, while EU officials contend that this experiment in centralized planning protects the health of Europeans, it may well harm their health. Science linking certain nutrients to disease risk reducing effects (such as omega-3 fatty acids and heart and brain health; antioxidants and reduction in the risk of certain kinds of cancer; selenium and reduction in certain kinds of cancer, among many others) may well prove true, yet in Europe, consumers will be denied that information in the market into the foreseeable future.

Consequently, those Europeans who would wish to bet on the provability of emerging science by exercising choice in the market will be denied the opportunity to make that bet by a paternalistic EU, an EU that thinks it knows better than the typical European what is in that European’s own self-interest. The result may well be a higher level of heart disease, senescence, Alzheimer’s, and cancer than would otherwise be the case. At a minimum, this new system reduces the sovereignty of EU member states and, most importantly, citizens of each EU member country, proving once again that a common market can also mean common enslavement.

Jonathan Emord can be reached at jonathan.emord@troymedia.com

http://www.troymedia.com/?p=13380#ixzz0xdqMoHEE

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Do you even need to ask why is this important to the US?

OC

The Recent Egg Recall: Avoid the Problem -- Buy Organic

“Eggs from natural and organic producers usually take a more direct route to the customer,” Damerow said. “When customers know where their food comes from, producers have a greater incentive to provide safe products.”

Click here for the whole story:

http://naturalfoodsmerchandiser.com/tabId/119/itemId/4901/Egg-recall-expands-naturals-not-included.aspx

OC

Mercury's in Retrograde - Toxic To Teeth, Toxic To The Environment, Toxic To All

Surgeon General Warning: Reading this press release may be beneficial to your health

It’s not for naught that there’s a proposed resolution in a plank in the forthcoming United Nations treaty on mercury, a date certain to determine the end of dental mercury amalgam. European nation have largely banned malicious mercury. But in the United States, our very survival depends upon the Obama Administration leading the world in adopting this plank. Marketed deceptively as “silver fillings,” amalgam is an environmental pollutant for us all, and a serious workplace hazard for young female dental workers. Two-tiered dentistry in America, where the haves get alternatives and the have-nots get the shaft along with totally toxic mercury fillings must be eliminated.

Explanation

Mercury is a virulent neurotoxin and a reproductive toxin. It is already so omnipresent in our environment that US EPA says one in 7 woman of childbearing age is at risk of having a brain-damaged child. Dental mercury (amalgam) is a primitive, pre-Civil War polluting product – composed mainly (43 to 54%) of mercury.

Major environmental pollutant: Amalgam is the #2 source of annual mercury sales in the US, the largest source of mercury in the wastewater, and the largest source of mercury from household waste. More mercury is in Americans’ teeth than in all products combined. With cremation use increasing, amalgam is a major source of air pollution.

Workplace hazard for young female dental workers. Proposition 65 mandates signs in dental offices that, as a matter of law, must read: “Dental Amalgam, used in many dental fillings, causes exposure to mercury, a chemical known to the state of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

Social injustice: The wealthy have escaped to alternatives; America now has, as an NAACP witness testifying before Congress noted, “two-tiered dentistry … choice for the rich and mercury for the poor.” Drill, fill, and bill mercury dentistry is still practiced on our soldiers and sailors, our prisoners, our working poor, and by the Indian Health Service,; masses all willing to be free of mercury once the facts are out

Market deception: Over three-fourths of consumers, says a Zogby poll, would choose a non-mercury fillings – if they knew. The marketing term “silver fillings” misleads them.

A risk for children: The Dental Board of California provides a fact sheet for every patient that reads, in part, that mercury from dental amalgam “may harm the developing brain of a child or fetus.”

Taxpayer rip-off: When externalized costs – environmental clean-up, health care bills – are included, amalgam is the highest priced filling material (not the lowest). Amalgam manufacturers hand the bill to California taxpayers, who are hardly in a position to pay.

Never used in modern dentistry: Modern dentists have transitioned completely out of this historical anachronism. It’s time for the other half to do the same.

Mercury treaty negotiations: Under UN auspices, the nations are determining what to include in a treaty devoted solely to mercury. To his credit, President Obama reversed Bush and directed the U. S. to participate. As a Senator, Mr. Obama had a great record against mercury, and America could now lead the way toward a comprehensive treaty phasing out all man-made mercury. But the U.S. must fight amalgam manufacturers who seek to make amalgam standard in developing countries as it used to be in the U.S.

President Obama’s splendid record on mercury -

As a Senator

Senator Obama

· He authored the law that bans the export of elemental mercury

o Think about that. The most capitalist society in history, which exports all manner of weapons, toxins, cigarettes, whatever --- writes a law saying companies may not export mercury.

o It’s part of the world strategy: make each country dispose of its own mercury rather than paying off a third world country to dump it in; it makes us address our mercury problem.

· He convinced the Dept of Energy to bury, not sell, excess mercury. Part of the strategy to zero out mercury on this planet is to reduce its availability, raising its price

.

As a President

President Obama

· Put in motion this mercury treaty. Talks had ground to zero, because Bush was against the treaty, as was China, so without them, why move forward? The month after Pres Obama took office, at a UN Environmental Programme session in Nairobi, the new Obama Administration made clear it wanted a treaty. So a calendar was formed: five sessions over three years, 2010-13,to end with a treaty.

· I was told about the centrality of the Obama role by both a UN official and a British diplomat.

Charles G. Brown, National Counsel
Consumers for Dental Choice
316 F St., N.E., Suite 210, Washington, DC 20002
Ph. 202.544-6333; fax 202.544-6331
charlie@toxicteeth.org,
www.toxicteeth.org
Working for Mercury-Free Dentistry

Get Hip to Hemp

by Vera Tweed

If human beings could cultivate only one plant, hemp would be a smart choice. It can supply the raw materials to build homes, make furniture, created decorative accessories and clothing, a produce a variety of foods. It can also add a touch of luxury in lotions and creams, keeping our skin soft.

The seeds or "nuts' of the hemp plant are the source of various hemp foods and hemp milk. Hemp nuts are rich in healthful fats and protein, and a good source of fiber.

Hemp is also good for the planet. Unlike most plants that are commercially cultivated, hemp is grown without pesticides because it is naturally resilient. And rather than depleting soil, hemp has a revitalizing effect. Agriculture Canada, that country's cousin to our USDA, estimates that per acre, hemp yields four times as much paper as trees and more digestible protein than any other food source. And it takes only three to four months for the plant to mature, making it an extremely sustainable commodity.

Can you get high on hemp?

No. Industrial hemp, the plant used to make food, fabric, and other commodities comes from the same botanical family as marijuana, but is a different plant and does not contain THC, the psychoactive ingredient in the drug.

Well-balanced nutrition

We need an optimum balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fats. The optimum ratio is somewhere between 2:1 and 5:1. In hemp nuts. the ratio is approximately 3:1, in the optimum range. Hemp oil also contains this beneficial ratio Hemp protein is easily digested and contains well-balanced amounts of all essential amino acids for older children and adults. (It isn't a complete protein for children under 5.)

How to Benefit from Hemp

Here are some ways to enjoy hemp:

• Eat the nuts as a snack or add them to salads or cereal.

• Eat hemp butter like nut butters.

• Drizzle hemp oil on salads or vegetables after cooking.

• Add plain or flavored hemp protein powder to smoothies or sprinkle an unflavored version on raw vegetables or salads.

• Drink hemp milk.

• Bake with hemp flour.

For recipes using hemp foods, visit www.manitobaharvest.com and www.livingharvest.com.

OC

Note: LNH has no business relationships nor endorses specific products relevant to this information.