Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

This is very good news for our campaign to save estriol, other bioidentical hormones, and many other compounded supplements and drugs from being regulated right out of existence. But much more work must be done to save these vital medications. Action Alert!

ANH-USA worked hard with our allies for many months to get this provision into the omnibus bill that was just passed to fund the government. The competition to get provisions into such a bill is intense, and we are especially grateful to our congressional friends who made this possible.

Like most people who follow government, we are not fans of omnibus bills. They are accurately described as “Christmas tree” legislation in which special interests of all sorts try to get some special favor included—such as a tax break for a single industry or even a single company. But we needed to send a message to the Food and Drug Administration from the one place the FDA has to listen to—Congress—and fortunately we and our allies succeeded in doing so.

There is a tremendous amount at stake. The FDA has been trying to eliminate bioidentical hormones and other critical compounded supplements—many of them only available as compounded supplements—for many, many years.

Each time, we have stopped them. But recent congressional legislation (the Drug Quality and Security Act, or DQSA) gave the FDA increased authority over compounding pharmacies, and the agency has responded by abusing its new powers to achieve its old agenda. In effect, the FDA has been on a course to regulate compounded drugs and supplements out of existence.

Why is the FDA doing this? We can’t say for sure, but we believe it is one more agency attempt to eliminate compounding because it represents competition for the big drug companies. Big Pharma has, in our view, taken control of the agency that is supposed to regulate it. The result is the most powerful government agency in our country, in control of much of our economy, doing its best to cement Big Pharma’s monopolies. If anyone wants to know why medical costs are out of control, and so much medical innovation is stymied, one need look no further.

Here is what we are trying to save:

• Bioidentical estriol in particular, but also testosterone, estradiol and progesterone, are currently all at risk. The danger is that the FDA will arbitrarily and nonsensically find them “too difficult to compound,” despite their having been compounded for decades. In addition to bioidentical hormones, delivery systems such as time release capsules have also been nominated to the “difficult to compound” list—threatening, for example, time-release thyroid drugs. The FDA has separately proposed to eliminate public participation from the determination process, so this would illegally occur behind closed doors with no recourse.
• Compounded IV treatments are also at risk. These are doctors’ drips of critical nutrients (including even the most common vitamins, e.g. C and B and minerals) into the patient’s blood, and are essential for many, many ailing patients. IV glutathione, one of the bodies most important defenses against disease, could be rejected for various technical reasons—it is not a component of an FDA-approved drug and has no USP monograph, so it’s very uncertain whether FDA will add it to the bulk drug list.
• IV vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients (considered drugs when used in an IV) are already less accessible and much more expensive because office use (see below) is no longer permitted. Interstate shipment limitations reduce access to all drugs. Since IVs are rarely paid for by insurance companies, making them prohibitively expensive is yet another indirect way to ban them, despite their proven medical value.
• All compounded dietary supplements must be pre-approved, with one potential exception—unless it is a component of an approved drug. This exception, if even recognized, would apply to very few supplements. Note further that no one has submitted a comprehensive list of supplements to the FDA to review. Those submitted have mostly been denied thus far. At this point, doctors are afraid to submit more since they will just be rejected.
• Compounded chelation drugs are also threatened. Ironically a controversial government-run study recently reaffirmed chelation’s effectiveness for heart disease and other problems, much to the dismay of conventional medicine critics and Big Pharma companies.
• Separately, insurance companies have stopped paying for many compounded drugs, further reducing demand.

With all of these issues combined, it will increasingly difficult for compounding pharmacies to stay in business. If they disappear, so will the most important compounded drugs

So what provision was in the omnibus budget bill that might help? It covered the following:

 Office Use

“Office use” is when a physician, in his or her office or other treatment area, administers a compounded medicinal preparation directly to a patient for the immediate treatment of a problem. In these instances, a doctor would need to have a reserve supply of the compounded drugs on hand. This enables doctors to provide immediate relief to patients who come into their office, or to have a ready supply for patients whom they have a long history of treating. It also reduces the cost of the treatment since the medication can be ordered in bulk.

Upon the passage of DQSA, the FDA immediately indicated it would apply the law in a way that eliminated office use. In doing so, the agency simply ignored letters from a number of senators who told the FDA in no uncertain terms that this was not the intent of the law.

The language in the budget bill directs the FDA to issue a guidance document on how compounding pharmacists can continue to engage in office use.

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

The FDA’s regulation writing for the bill produced the idea of an MOU, something not in the legislation itself. The agency said that unless states entered into an MOU with the FDA, traditional pharmacies could only send 5% of their sales per month out-of-state. If states signed the MOU, that number jumped to 30%, but states then assumed responsibility for regulating the pharmacies. This was a kind of “poison pill” because the assumption was that states would not agree to do this. As we have pointed out, these percent limitations defy logic. How is any compounder supposed to know what percent it has sold out of state until the end of the year?—after which it might have already violated the rule. The FDA can then apply draconian penalties for inadvertently violating the rule. This is truly Orwellian.

In releasing the draft MOU, the FDA attempted to extend its jurisdiction over compounding by broadening the definition of “distribution” to include “dispensing.” Congress gave the FDA the authority to place a limit on the interstate “distribution” of compounded products for office use. It did not give the FDA the authority to limit the interstate “dispensing” of compounded products, where “dispensing” refers to a compounded medication provided to an individual patient pursuant to a prescription or a doctor’s order.

Despite the clarity of the statute and Congress’s intent on this matter, the FDA continues to maintain its authority to broaden the definition of “distribute” to include “dispensing” to an individual patient—a clear violation of the law.

Language in the budget bill directs the FDA to take note of the difference between “dispense” and “distribute” and affirms that the FDA only has statutory authority to regulate the “distribution” of compounded medications.

Bulk Drug List

This part of the compounding provision directs the FDA to describe how they will move forward with their bulk ingredient list. To be eligible to be compounded, a substance must either have a USP monograph, be a component of an approved drug, or appear on a bulk drug list developed by the FDA. But, as we’ve said before in more detail, this process seems to be rigged. For instance, the FDA indicated that it would not accept USP monographs for supplements, meaning that any supplement, to be compounded, would have to be nominated and accepted to the bulk drug list.

Remember that even curcumin was rejected for inclusion in the bulk drug list, which does not bode well for other ingredients. Curcumin is not only a common spice used for cooking, it is an actual food (not merely derived from food), and as a supplement it has tremendous medicinal use. If it were a drug, it would make drug companies billions, and they would like nothing better to monopolize its use. We hope the provision in the omnibus bill will improve the outlook for compounded curcumin and other nutrients.

Access to these compounded drugs is a life-and-death issue for many people. Take estriol, for example—one of the three types of estrogen produced by the body. By the 1990s, one-third of menopausal women were taking Premarin, which comes from horse urine estrogens and is not bioidentical to human estrogen. Unfortunately, Premarin has been associated with a number of devastating side effects, including a higher risk of breast cancer, blood clotting, and heart disease.

Bioidentical estriol, on the other hand, is not only safer, it has also been shown to improve bone density, promote youthful skin, and enhance urinary and other aspects of health. These benefits appear to be of no concern to the FDA—estriol, progesterone, and estradiol all stand to be eliminated as ingredients that can be compounded. And yes, if they were eliminated, Big Pharma might well respond with products of their own. But those products would be tablets (the pharmaceutical industry wants only one-size-fits-all products, and these hormones should not be taken by tablet), and the price would no doubt be astronomical.

Action Alert! If we are to work together to stop an out-of-control FDA from eliminating these compounded hormones and hundreds of other critical compounded supplements and drugs, we must all act together now. Please thank Congress for this new provision and tell them how much you care about saving compounded medications. Please send your message immediately!

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:

Kids, Eat All the Junk Food You Like—Just Go Jogging for Three or Four Hours Every Day!

from The Alliance for Natural Health http://ift.tt/1S95Cnd via Aloe for Health

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Kids, Eat All the Junk Food You Like— Just Go Jogging for Three or Four Hours Every Day!

It’s amazing how much influence ten million dollars will buy.

We recently told you about Coca-Cola’s pet project, the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN)—a nonprofit that claimed to fund research into causes of obesity, but instead promoted the idea that lack of exercise, not bad diet, is primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic.

GEBN used code words like “energy balance” because they looked solely at calories consumed vs. calories expended, whereas natural health is founded on the premise that paying attention to the content of those calories is vital to both health and weight management. Through the GEBN, Coca-Cola could continue to peddle its sugary sodas without worrying about the damage it is doing to the health of its consumers.

This fundamentally flawed idea was also picked up in Michele Obama’s school lunch program, which is why portions were so conspicuously downsized. Mrs. Obama may have known better than to think that obesity was just a matter of too many calories, but if so, Big Food’s political influence effectively gagged her.

Now we’ve learned that GEBN has been disbanded due to “resource limitations.” GEBN’s announcement followed hard on the heels of the resignation of Coke’s science and health officer, Rhona Applebaum, amid the email scandal we reported. So far, so good. But that doesn’t mean that Big Food’s phony science has been put to rest.

Using the same approach—but doing it with much more money—is a group called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), and like GEBN, it’s a nonprofit that is completely funded and run by junk food companies (though this one has an annual budget of $10 million). The CEO of PepsiCo also serves as CEO for this foundation; on its board of directors are the CEOs of Kellogg, Hershey, Nestle USA, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Smucker, and General Mills.

The HWCF has created a campaign, “Together Counts,” which goes to elementary schools nationwide with a health curriculum called Energy Balance 101. It has taught over 28 million kids this same skewed concept: that in order to stay fit, all we need to do is balance calories consumed with calories expended—that we can eat whatever we wish so long as we get enough exercise to burn those calories. According to Mother Jones:

In the first lesson, elementary schoolers learn that anything and everything takes energy, from playing sports to doing homework. Teachers are instructed to ask how much you would need to eat or drink in order to “balance shooting baskets for 30 minutes.” Calories in, calories out.

The HWCF is promoting its energy balance programs everywhere—including the Girl Scouts (all 1.7 million of them), the national PTA association, and Head Start—with compensated Mommy bloggers joining in as well.

This “energy balance” notion has been part of the junk food landscape for over a decade, with McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC all promising that consumers can eat whatever highly processed fast food they want, so long as they burn enough calories to compensate. Not a single one tells the truth: that science has shown again and again and again that all calories are not created equal—that the source and quality of those calories is critical.

And of course the calories-in-calories-out crowd pretend that GMOs are no more harmful than anything else in their processed junk food paradise. They think you can eat all your calories in burgers, fries, and shakes, and so long as you exercise enough to burn off all those calories.

Except that you can’t.

Barry Popkin, who established the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, is a critic of the HWCF, and has done a careful scientific evaluation of the foundation’s approach. According to Popkin, “We’ll never be able to move enough to offset one or two Cokes a day.” His research has found that roughly 60 percent of the American population consumes the equivalent of a Coke per day in sugary beverages—though adults tend to prefer sugar-heavy lattes and energy drinks. For a 60-pound child, working off the calories in a Coke means jogging for more than an hour. And that’s just for a single cola. What of the calories from a Happy Meal or a KFC box? How many more hours of jogging are required? And of course jogging won’t fix the central problem, which is that the body is being flooded with fructose, something that nature never intended or anticipated.

The junk food industry is using childhood obesity (and obesity in general) as a way to make their own consumers feel guiltier than they already do. “It’s not our ‘food’ that’s making you fat—you’re just not exercising enough!” True: we, as a nation, may not be exercising enough. What’s also true is that their sugary drinks, damaged fats, and GMO-laden foods are slowly poisoning us, no matter how many calories we burn.

One bright spot: food manufacturers will listen to their consumers and change their ways—as we reported last week—if we continue to vote with our dollars. They can’t sell what we won’t buy.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

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Action Alert: Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

Related article: Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

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Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

This is very good news for our campaign to save estriol, other bioidentical hormones, and many other compounded supplements and drugs from being regulated right out of existence. But much more work must be done to save these vital medications. Action Alert!

ANH-USA worked hard with our allies for many months to get this provision into the omnibus bill that was just passed to fund the government. The competition to get provisions into such a bill is intense, and we are especially grateful to our congressional friends who made this possible.

Like most people who follow government, we are not fans of omnibus bills. They are accurately described as “Christmas tree” legislation in which special interests of all sorts try to get some special favor included—such as a tax break for a single industry or even a single company. But we needed to send a message to the Food and Drug Administration from the one place the FDA has to listen to—Congress—and fortunately we and our allies succeeded in doing so.

There is a tremendous amount at stake. The FDA has been trying to eliminate bioidentical hormones and other critical compounded supplements—many of them only available as compounded supplements—for many, many years.

Each time, we have stopped them. But recent congressional legislation (the Drug Quality and Security Act, or DQSA) gave the FDA increased authority over compounding pharmacies, and the agency has responded by abusing its new powers to achieve its old agenda. In effect, the FDA has been on a course to regulate compounded drugs and supplements out of existence.

Why is the FDA doing this? We can’t say for sure, but we believe it is one more agency attempt to eliminate compounding because it represents competition for the big drug companies. Big Pharma has, in our view, taken control of the agency that is supposed to regulate it. The result is the most powerful government agency in our country, in control of much of our economy, doing its best to cement Big Pharma’s monopolies. If anyone wants to know why medical costs are out of control, and so much medical innovation is stymied, one need look no further.

Here is what we are trying to save:

• Bioidentical estriol in particular, but also testosterone, estradiol and progesterone, are currently all at risk. The danger is that the FDA will arbitrarily and nonsensically find them “too difficult to compound,” despite their having been compounded for decades. In addition to bioidentical hormones, delivery systems such as time release capsules have also been nominated to the “difficult to compound” list—threatening, for example, time-release thyroid drugs. The FDA has separately proposed to eliminate public participation from the determination process, so this would illegally occur behind closed doors with no recourse.
• Compounded IV treatments are also at risk. These are doctors’ drips of critical nutrients (including even the most common vitamins, e.g. C and B and minerals) into the patient’s blood, and are essential for many, many ailing patients. IV glutathione, one of the bodies most important defenses against disease, could be rejected for various technical reasons—it is not a component of an FDA-approved drug and has no USP monograph, so it’s very uncertain whether FDA will add it to the bulk drug list.
• IV vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients (considered drugs when used in an IV) are already less accessible and much more expensive because office use (see below) is no longer permitted. Interstate shipment limitations reduce access to all drugs. Since IVs are rarely paid for by insurance companies, making them prohibitively expensive is yet another indirect way to ban them, despite their proven medical value.
• All compounded dietary supplements must be pre-approved, with one potential exception—unless it is a component of an approved drug. This exception, if even recognized, would apply to very few supplements. Note further that no one has submitted a comprehensive list of supplements to the FDA to review. Those submitted have mostly been denied thus far. At this point, doctors are afraid to submit more since they will just be rejected.
• Compounded chelation drugs are also threatened. Ironically a controversial government-run study recently reaffirmed chelation’s effectiveness for heart disease and other problems, much to the dismay of conventional medicine critics and Big Pharma companies.
• Separately, insurance companies have stopped paying for many compounded drugs, further reducing demand.

With all of these issues combined, it will increasingly difficult for compounding pharmacies to stay in business. If they disappear, so will the most important compounded drugs

So what provision was in the omnibus budget bill that might help? It covered the following:

 Office Use

“Office use” is when a physician, in his or her office or other treatment area, administers a compounded medicinal preparation directly to a patient for the immediate treatment of a problem. In these instances, a doctor would need to have a reserve supply of the compounded drugs on hand. This enables doctors to provide immediate relief to patients who come into their office, or to have a ready supply for patients whom they have a long history of treating. It also reduces the cost of the treatment since the medication can be ordered in bulk.

Upon the passage of DQSA, the FDA immediately indicated it would apply the law in a way that eliminated office use. In doing so, the agency simply ignored letters from a number of senators who told the FDA in no uncertain terms that this was not the intent of the law.

The language in the budget bill directs the FDA to issue a guidance document on how compounding pharmacists can continue to engage in office use.

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

The FDA’s regulation writing for the bill produced the idea of an MOU, something not in the legislation itself. The agency said that unless states entered into an MOU with the FDA, traditional pharmacies could only send 5% of their sales per month out-of-state. If states signed the MOU, that number jumped to 30%, but states then assumed responsibility for regulating the pharmacies. This was a kind of “poison pill” because the assumption was that states would not agree to do this. As we have pointed out, these percent limitations defy logic. How is any compounder supposed to know what percent it has sold out of state until the end of the year?—after which it might have already violated the rule. The FDA can then apply draconian penalties for inadvertently violating the rule. This is truly Orwellian.

In releasing the draft MOU, the FDA attempted to extend its jurisdiction over compounding by broadening the definition of “distribution” to include “dispensing.” Congress gave the FDA the authority to place a limit on the interstate “distribution” of compounded products for office use. It did not give the FDA the authority to limit the interstate “dispensing” of compounded products, where “dispensing” refers to a compounded medication provided to an individual patient pursuant to a prescription or a doctor’s order.

Despite the clarity of the statute and Congress’s intent on this matter, the FDA continues to maintain its authority to broaden the definition of “distribute” to include “dispensing” to an individual patient—a clear violation of the law.

Language in the budget bill directs the FDA to take note of the difference between “dispense” and “distribute” and affirms that the FDA only has statutory authority to regulate the “distribution” of compounded medications.

Bulk Drug List

This part of the compounding provision directs the FDA to describe how they will move forward with their bulk ingredient list. To be eligible to be compounded, a substance must either have a USP monograph, be a component of an approved drug, or appear on a bulk drug list developed by the FDA. But, as we’ve said before in more detail, this process seems to be rigged. For instance, the FDA indicated that it would not accept USP monographs for supplements, meaning that any supplement, to be compounded, would have to be nominated and accepted to the bulk drug list.

Remember that even curcumin was rejected for inclusion in the bulk drug list, which does not bode well for other ingredients. Curcumin is not only a common spice used for cooking, it is an actual food (not merely derived from food), and as a supplement it has tremendous medicinal use. If it were a drug, it would make drug companies billions, and they would like nothing better to monopolize its use. We hope the provision in the omnibus bill will improve the outlook for compounded curcumin and other nutrients.

Access to these compounded drugs is a life-and-death issue for many people. Take estriol, for example—one of the three types of estrogen produced by the body. By the 1990s, one-third of menopausal women were taking Premarin, which comes from horse urine estrogens and is not bioidentical to human estrogen. Unfortunately, Premarin has been associated with a number of devastating side effects, including a higher risk of breast cancer, blood clotting, and heart disease.

Bioidentical estriol, on the other hand, is not only safer, it has also been shown to improve bone density, promote youthful skin, and enhance urinary and other aspects of health. These benefits appear to be of no concern to the FDA—estriol, progesterone, and estradiol all stand to be eliminated as ingredients that can be compounded. And yes, if they were eliminated, Big Pharma might well respond with products of their own. But those products would be tablets (the pharmaceutical industry wants only one-size-fits-all products, and these hormones should not be taken by tablet), and the price would no doubt be astronomical.

Action Alert! If we are to work together to stop an out-of-control FDA from eliminating these compounded hormones and hundreds of other critical compounded supplements and drugs, we must all act together now. Please thank Congress for this new provision and tell them how much you care about saving compounded medications. Please send your message immediately!

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:

Kids, Eat All the Junk Food You Like—Just Go Jogging for Three or Four Hours Every Day!

from The Alliance for Natural Health http://ift.tt/1S95Cnd via Aloe for Health
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1V3RZ8D

Kids, Eat All the Junk Food You Like— Just Go Jogging for Three or Four Hours Every Day!

It’s amazing how much influence ten million dollars will buy.

We recently told you about Coca-Cola’s pet project, the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN)—a nonprofit that claimed to fund research into causes of obesity, but instead promoted the idea that lack of exercise, not bad diet, is primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic.

GEBN used code words like “energy balance” because they looked solely at calories consumed vs. calories expended, whereas natural health is founded on the premise that paying attention to the content of those calories is vital to both health and weight management. Through the GEBN, Coca-Cola could continue to peddle its sugary sodas without worrying about the damage it is doing to the health of its consumers.

This fundamentally flawed idea was also picked up in Michele Obama’s school lunch program, which is why portions were so conspicuously downsized. Mrs. Obama may have known better than to think that obesity was just a matter of too many calories, but if so, Big Food’s political influence effectively gagged her.

Now we’ve learned that GEBN has been disbanded due to “resource limitations.” GEBN’s announcement followed hard on the heels of the resignation of Coke’s science and health officer, Rhona Applebaum, amid the email scandal we reported. So far, so good. But that doesn’t mean that Big Food’s phony science has been put to rest.

Using the same approach—but doing it with much more money—is a group called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), and like GEBN, it’s a nonprofit that is completely funded and run by junk food companies (though this one has an annual budget of $10 million). The CEO of PepsiCo also serves as CEO for this foundation; on its board of directors are the CEOs of Kellogg, Hershey, Nestle USA, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Smucker, and General Mills.

The HWCF has created a campaign, “Together Counts,” which goes to elementary schools nationwide with a health curriculum called Energy Balance 101. It has taught over 28 million kids this same skewed concept: that in order to stay fit, all we need to do is balance calories consumed with calories expended—that we can eat whatever we wish so long as we get enough exercise to burn those calories. According to Mother Jones:

In the first lesson, elementary schoolers learn that anything and everything takes energy, from playing sports to doing homework. Teachers are instructed to ask how much you would need to eat or drink in order to “balance shooting baskets for 30 minutes.” Calories in, calories out.

The HWCF is promoting its energy balance programs everywhere—including the Girl Scouts (all 1.7 million of them), the national PTA association, and Head Start—with compensated Mommy bloggers joining in as well.

This “energy balance” notion has been part of the junk food landscape for over a decade, with McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC all promising that consumers can eat whatever highly processed fast food they want, so long as they burn enough calories to compensate. Not a single one tells the truth: that science has shown again and again and again that all calories are not created equal—that the source and quality of those calories is critical.

And of course the calories-in-calories-out crowd pretend that GMOs are no more harmful than anything else in their processed junk food paradise. They think you can eat all your calories in burgers, fries, and shakes, and so long as you exercise enough to burn off all those calories.

Except that you can’t.

Barry Popkin, who established the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, is a critic of the HWCF, and has done a careful scientific evaluation of the foundation’s approach. According to Popkin, “We’ll never be able to move enough to offset one or two Cokes a day.” His research has found that roughly 60 percent of the American population consumes the equivalent of a Coke per day in sugary beverages—though adults tend to prefer sugar-heavy lattes and energy drinks. For a 60-pound child, working off the calories in a Coke means jogging for more than an hour. And that’s just for a single cola. What of the calories from a Happy Meal or a KFC box? How many more hours of jogging are required? And of course jogging won’t fix the central problem, which is that the body is being flooded with fructose, something that nature never intended or anticipated.

The junk food industry is using childhood obesity (and obesity in general) as a way to make their own consumers feel guiltier than they already do. “It’s not our ‘food’ that’s making you fat—you’re just not exercising enough!” True: we, as a nation, may not be exercising enough. What’s also true is that their sugary drinks, damaged fats, and GMO-laden foods are slowly poisoning us, no matter how many calories we burn.

One bright spot: food manufacturers will listen to their consumers and change their ways—as we reported last week—if we continue to vote with our dollars. They can’t sell what we won’t buy.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

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Action Alert: Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

Related article: Congress Sends Strong Warning to FDA

Trouble Taking Action? Click here.

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What’s In That Dough?

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What’s In That Dough?

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Action Alert: Label Frankenfish!

Trouble Taking Action? Click here.

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Your Family’s Meat—Will You Know Where It Comes From?

A powerful international body is overriding laws passed by Congress that tell you what country your meat comes from—and Congress is letting it happen. Action Alert!

Last week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling is pushing some members of Congress to cave in to Big Food. The international body ruled that the United States’ country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law for beef and pork was discriminatory, and that Canada and Mexico are entitled to retaliatory tariffs of $782 million and $227.8 million, respectively.

COOL has been in place since 2009. It requires meat to be labeled to indicate where it was born, raised, and processed. Seafood labeling has been covered since 2005. Other laws cover other types of food such as vegetables.

The WTO’s decision comes as no surprise. As we reported previously, the WTO had already ruled that COOL unfairly discriminates against meat from Canada and Mexico, violating the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement. However, before the WTO put a price tag on COOL, the House of Representatives buckled and voted to repeal the law, likely from the fear that the tariffs would hurt large beef and pork producers in their districts. Now, key members of the Senate are indicating that they too are in support of repealing COOL. Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) said last week, “I will continue to look for all legislative opportunities to repeal COOL.” The ranking member on the committee, Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), has pledged to avoid retaliatory tariff on US products.

The COOL law, like mandatory GMO labeling, is overwhelmingly popular with the public. One poll found that 92% of Americans support COOL. Any decision to alter or remove COOL is to surrender to large industrial pork and beef producers in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

As we noted in our previous coverage, an especially troubling aspect of this issue is the precedent it sets. The WTO is not democratic, and decisions are often made by bureaucrats who meet in secret and are not screened for conflicts of interest. If the WTO can arbitrarily override our law, couldn’t it act similarly against other country-of-origin laws, and then against any future GMO labeling laws? From there it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the WTO to be telling us what can be on other food labels—or even supplement labels.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal raises similar concerns, as we noted in recent coverage.

The bottom line is this: consumers should have access to health and safety information about their food so they can make informed choices about what to feed their families. Congress should not kowtow to the WTO—and should also look for bilateral arrangements with the affected countries.

Action Alert! Write to your senators and urge them to oppose the repeal of COOL. Please send your message immediately.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Big Food Wants to Sneak a BAN on Mandatory GMO Labeling into the Budget Bill!

GM Chicken Approved “For Medicinal Purposes”! Are Humans Next?

GMO Fraud Revealed

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Big Food Wants to Sneak a BAN on Mandatory GMO Labeling into the Budget Bill!

Some in Congress are fighting this dangerous rider, but to be successful, they need citizens to flood their legislators with angry letters! Action Alert!

Last week saw further developments in Congress regarding GMO labeling. Five prominent Democrats in the Senate—Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT)—publicly opposed an anti-labeling provision that the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and their congressional allies are attempting to attach to the end-of-year must-pass budget bill. Many of these senators are co-sponsors of the mandatory labeling bill introduced by Sen. Boxer.

Even if the GMA’s subterfuge fails, anti-labeling advocates (who are supported and financed by the food industry) are not likely to relent. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) has said that a different proposal to pre-empt state labeling—one that would make labeling completely voluntary, which is tantamount to having no labeling whatsoever—could be ready as early as next year; Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), who is working on an alternative to Rep. Mike Pompeo’s (R-KS) bill with Sens. John Hoeven (R-ND) and Stabenow, told reporters, “We are still working on it.”

Vermont’s mandatory labeling law goes into effect in July of 2016, so the GMA and the biotech industry are looking to enact some kind of state preemption legislation before this law goes into effect. Passage of voluntary labeling legislation also puts Connecticut and Maine’s GMO labeling legislation in jeopardy, because the bills in both states contain trigger clauses requiring four other states (in Connecticut’s case) and five other states (in Maine’s case) to pass similar bills before the legislation goes into effect.

More details have also come to light on what a voluntary system might look like. We reported previously that such a system might include voluntary, scannable QR codes on the labels of food products—meaning that you would need to haul out your smartphone and fire up a scanner app (or else bring your own handheld scanner to the grocery store!) just to figure out whether foods contain GMOs or not.

In response to this news report, the GMA recently clarified that some companies may decide not to even change their labels and instead will simply put the information on their website. Rather than put a simple label on food packaging, companies would prefer that you perform Internet research in the middle of your supermarket aisles!

An op-ed from Vermont state representative Kate Webb (D) summed up the issue nicely:

At this time, congressional leaders are focused on defending GE technology, which obscures the real issue. The real issue is transparency and the ability to make an informed decision about how and where we spend our food dollars based on our values.

Time is running out. We must make sure that Congress knows we are watching. We must remind them that consumers—their constituents—have spoken loud and clear about their desire for mandatory GMO labeling or at the very least no congressional ban on such state labeling requirements.

Read about another way in which Congress may be preventing consumers from knowing where their food comes from in this issue of Pulse of Natural Health.

Action Alert! Even if you have previously written in on this issue, please write to your senators and urge them to oppose efforts to slip an anti-labeling rider into the end-of-year budget deal. Send your message immediately.

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GM Chicken Approved “For Medicinal Purposes”! Are Humans Next?

The floodgates are open for more genetically modified animals—possibly even humans.

Last week saw the approval of another genetically modified animal— this time a chicken genetically altered to produce a drug in its eggs. The drug is designed to replace a faulty enzyme in people with a rare genetic condition that prevents the body from breaking down fatty molecules in cells.

The genetically engineered (GE) chicken is not approved for human consumption, but it is the third so-called “farmaceutical” approved in the US market. Preceding the chicken was a GE goat that produces antithrombin, an anticoagulant, in its milk. Last year the FDA also approved a drug for treating hereditary angioedema that is produced by transgenic (GE) rabbits.

As one geneticist noted, “I can’t wait to see what comes next.” We can. We also expect the development of more GE animals as food following the approval of AquaAdvantage’s salmon, which we dubbed “Frankenfish” over five years ago, the first GE animal approved for human consumption. The FDA has indicated these salmon will not even need to carry a label identifying them as genetically modified—so you may have no idea what you are eating.

There is much talk of creating so-called designer babies, whose parents would be able to select the genetic characteristics that their child develops (being tall, intelligent, etc.). Scientists are also working on performing DNA transplants into human embryos to eliminate genetic diseases. A baby born this way would have genetic material from three different people and pass on its genetic makeup to future generations. Scientists are learning, however, that changing even one gene can result in harmful DNA mutations that reverberate throughout the entire DNA structure.

This is the stuff of dystopian science fiction stories, and we may be approaching such a world faster than we think.

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GMO Fraud Revealed

A French court has found that fraud and defamation were employed to discredit a study linking GMOs to cancer in rats.

Dr. Gilles- Éric Séralini, a French molecular biologist who studies the health effects of GMOs, recently won two court cases against those who had sought to ruin his reputation after he published a study that linked GMO corn to cancer in rats. Following heavy pressure from the GMO industry, the article was retracted. It was eventually republished, but in a less prestigious publication.

The first lawsuit found one of Séralini’s accusers guilty of fraud, having used the name of another scientist without that scientist’s permission or knowledge in order to discredit Séralini’s study. In the second, journalists at a French magazine who had accused Séralini of scientific fraud were found guilty of defamation.

Séralini, a professor at the University of Caen in France, had done a number of studies challenging the safety of genetically engineered foods. The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology first published—then, under intense pressure decided to retract—Séralini’s 2012 paper containing evidence that GMO corn and Roundup can cause cancer and premature death in rats. The retraction was covered extensively in the media, which labeled Séralini a fraud—yet when the study was republished in Environmental Sciences Europe, this validation made few headlines.

At the time of its retraction, the New York Times said the paper had been criticized as “flawed, sensationalistic, and possibly even fraudulent by many scientists, some of whom are allied with the biotechnology industry” [emphasis ours].

The few journalists not bought and paid for by the biotech industry reported that Séralini was blasted for the number and type of rats that he used for the study, even though studies by the biotech industry use the same type and approximate number of rats!

There are also some suspicious facts surrounding the journal’s decision to retract the study. For instance, six months after the study was published, Food and Chemical Toxicology announced that it was creating a new position, Associate Editor for Biotechnology, and filled the position with a former Monsanto employee. The retraction occurred a few months later. Coincidence?

As we noted previously, this seems to have become standard practice in the biotech industry: slander and discredit anyone who exposes the dangers of GMO technology, and at the same time purchase the support of other scientists and journalists who will make the case for GMOs without complaint. It is bad enough to corrupt politicians. Corrupting scientists and journalists has particularly pernicious consequences for our society.

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Your Family’s Meat—Will You Know Where It Comes From?

A powerful international body is overriding laws passed by Congress that tell you what country your meat comes from—and Congress is letting it happen. Action Alert!

Last week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling is pushing some members of Congress to cave in to Big Food. The international body ruled that the United States’ country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law for beef and pork was discriminatory, and that Canada and Mexico are entitled to retaliatory tariffs of $782 million and $227.8 million, respectively.

COOL has been in place since 2009. It requires meat to be labeled to indicate where it was born, raised, and processed. Seafood labeling has been covered since 2005. Other laws cover other types of food such as vegetables.

The WTO’s decision comes as no surprise. As we reported previously, the WTO had already ruled that COOL unfairly discriminates against meat from Canada and Mexico, violating the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement. However, before the WTO put a price tag on COOL, the House of Representatives buckled and voted to repeal the law, likely from the fear that the tariffs would hurt large beef and pork producers in their districts. Now, key members of the Senate are indicating that they too are in support of repealing COOL. Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) said last week, “I will continue to look for all legislative opportunities to repeal COOL.” The ranking member on the committee, Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), has pledged to avoid retaliatory tariff on US products.

The COOL law, like mandatory GMO labeling, is overwhelmingly popular with the public. One poll found that 92% of Americans support COOL. Any decision to alter or remove COOL is to surrender to large industrial pork and beef producers in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

As we noted in our previous coverage, an especially troubling aspect of this issue is the precedent it sets. The WTO is not democratic, and decisions are often made by bureaucrats who meet in secret and are not screened for conflicts of interest. If the WTO can arbitrarily override our law, couldn’t it act similarly against other country-of-origin laws, and then against any future GMO labeling laws? From there it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the WTO to be telling us what can be on other food labels—or even supplement labels.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal raises similar concerns, as we noted in recent coverage.

The bottom line is this: consumers should have access to health and safety information about their food so they can make informed choices about what to feed their families. Congress should not kowtow to the WTO—and should also look for bilateral arrangements with the affected countries.

Action Alert! Write to your senators and urge them to oppose the repeal of COOL. Please send your message immediately.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Big Food Wants to Sneak a BAN on Mandatory GMO Labeling into the Budget Bill!

GM Chicken Approved “For Medicinal Purposes”! Are Humans Next?

GMO Fraud Revealed

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Big Food Wants to Sneak a BAN on Mandatory GMO Labeling into the Budget Bill!

Some in Congress are fighting this dangerous rider, but to be successful, they need citizens to flood their legislators with angry letters! Action Alert!

Last week saw further developments in Congress regarding GMO labeling. Five prominent Democrats in the Senate—Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT)—publicly opposed an anti-labeling provision that the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and their congressional allies are attempting to attach to the end-of-year must-pass budget bill. Many of these senators are co-sponsors of the mandatory labeling bill introduced by Sen. Boxer.

Even if the GMA’s subterfuge fails, anti-labeling advocates (who are supported and financed by the food industry) are not likely to relent. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) has said that a different proposal to pre-empt state labeling—one that would make labeling completely voluntary, which is tantamount to having no labeling whatsoever—could be ready as early as next year; Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), who is working on an alternative to Rep. Mike Pompeo’s (R-KS) bill with Sens. John Hoeven (R-ND) and Stabenow, told reporters, “We are still working on it.”

Vermont’s mandatory labeling law goes into effect in July of 2016, so the GMA and the biotech industry are looking to enact some kind of state preemption legislation before this law goes into effect. Passage of voluntary labeling legislation also puts Connecticut and Maine’s GMO labeling legislation in jeopardy, because the bills in both states contain trigger clauses requiring four other states (in Connecticut’s case) and five other states (in Maine’s case) to pass similar bills before the legislation goes into effect.

More details have also come to light on what a voluntary system might look like. We reported previously that such a system might include voluntary, scannable QR codes on the labels of food products—meaning that you would need to haul out your smartphone and fire up a scanner app (or else bring your own handheld scanner to the grocery store!) just to figure out whether foods contain GMOs or not.

In response to this news report, the GMA recently clarified that some companies may decide not to even change their labels and instead will simply put the information on their website. Rather than put a simple label on food packaging, companies would prefer that you perform Internet research in the middle of your supermarket aisles!

An op-ed from Vermont state representative Kate Webb (D) summed up the issue nicely:

At this time, congressional leaders are focused on defending GE technology, which obscures the real issue. The real issue is transparency and the ability to make an informed decision about how and where we spend our food dollars based on our values.

Time is running out. We must make sure that Congress knows we are watching. We must remind them that consumers—their constituents—have spoken loud and clear about their desire for mandatory GMO labeling or at the very least no congressional ban on such state labeling requirements.

Read about another way in which Congress may be preventing consumers from knowing where their food comes from in this issue of Pulse of Natural Health.

Action Alert! Even if you have previously written in on this issue, please write to your senators and urge them to oppose efforts to slip an anti-labeling rider into the end-of-year budget deal. Send your message immediately.

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GM Chicken Approved “For Medicinal Purposes”! Are Humans Next?

The floodgates are open for more genetically modified animals—possibly even humans.

Last week saw the approval of another genetically modified animal— this time a chicken genetically altered to produce a drug in its eggs. The drug is designed to replace a faulty enzyme in people with a rare genetic condition that prevents the body from breaking down fatty molecules in cells.

The genetically engineered (GE) chicken is not approved for human consumption, but it is the third so-called “farmaceutical” approved in the US market. Preceding the chicken was a GE goat that produces antithrombin, an anticoagulant, in its milk. Last year the FDA also approved a drug for treating hereditary angioedema that is produced by transgenic (GE) rabbits.

As one geneticist noted, “I can’t wait to see what comes next.” We can. We also expect the development of more GE animals as food following the approval of AquaAdvantage’s salmon, which we dubbed “Frankenfish” over five years ago, the first GE animal approved for human consumption. The FDA has indicated these salmon will not even need to carry a label identifying them as genetically modified—so you may have no idea what you are eating.

There is much talk of creating so-called designer babies, whose parents would be able to select the genetic characteristics that their child develops (being tall, intelligent, etc.). Scientists are also working on performing DNA transplants into human embryos to eliminate genetic diseases. A baby born this way would have genetic material from three different people and pass on its genetic makeup to future generations. Scientists are learning, however, that changing even one gene can result in harmful DNA mutations that reverberate throughout the entire DNA structure.

This is the stuff of dystopian science fiction stories, and we may be approaching such a world faster than we think.

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GMO Fraud Revealed

A French court has found that fraud and defamation were employed to discredit a study linking GMOs to cancer in rats.

Dr. Gilles- Éric Séralini, a French molecular biologist who studies the health effects of GMOs, recently won two court cases against those who had sought to ruin his reputation after he published a study that linked GMO corn to cancer in rats. Following heavy pressure from the GMO industry, the article was retracted. It was eventually republished, but in a less prestigious publication.

The first lawsuit found one of Séralini’s accusers guilty of fraud, having used the name of another scientist without that scientist’s permission or knowledge in order to discredit Séralini’s study. In the second, journalists at a French magazine who had accused Séralini of scientific fraud were found guilty of defamation.

Séralini, a professor at the University of Caen in France, had done a number of studies challenging the safety of genetically engineered foods. The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology first published—then, under intense pressure decided to retract—Séralini’s 2012 paper containing evidence that GMO corn and Roundup can cause cancer and premature death in rats. The retraction was covered extensively in the media, which labeled Séralini a fraud—yet when the study was republished in Environmental Sciences Europe, this validation made few headlines.

At the time of its retraction, the New York Times said the paper had been criticized as “flawed, sensationalistic, and possibly even fraudulent by many scientists, some of whom are allied with the biotechnology industry” [emphasis ours].

The few journalists not bought and paid for by the biotech industry reported that Séralini was blasted for the number and type of rats that he used for the study, even though studies by the biotech industry use the same type and approximate number of rats!

There are also some suspicious facts surrounding the journal’s decision to retract the study. For instance, six months after the study was published, Food and Chemical Toxicology announced that it was creating a new position, Associate Editor for Biotechnology, and filled the position with a former Monsanto employee. The retraction occurred a few months later. Coincidence?

As we noted previously, this seems to have become standard practice in the biotech industry: slander and discredit anyone who exposes the dangers of GMO technology, and at the same time purchase the support of other scientists and journalists who will make the case for GMOs without complaint. It is bad enough to corrupt politicians. Corrupting scientists and journalists has particularly pernicious consequences for our society.

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Protected: Botanical breakthrough beats high blood sugar and cuts cholesterol naturally

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Artificial Sweeteners Contribute to Diabetes

Microbes in our gastrointestinal tract power our immune systems and keep our insulin and blood sugar in balance. Aspartame and other manufactured no-calorie sweeteners are killing them. Action Alert!

Artificial sweeteners are among the most widely used food additives worldwide, regularly consumed by lean and obese individuals alike. Products containing artificial sweeteners bring in huge sales figures, and they’re touted as being a safe and healthful alternative to sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. The science, however, tells a different story.

An important study published in the journal Nature shows that all artificial sweeteners actually induce glucose intolerance, which leads to type 2 diabetes. A team of immunologists, molecular geneticists, and digestive tract disease specialists found that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners actually change the composition and function of our intestinal microbiota.

A microbiota is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space.” Joshua Lederberg coined the term to emphasize the importance of microorganisms inhabiting the human body in health and disease.

The research team identified sweetener-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to our susceptibility to metabolic disease. They also demonstrated how the sweeteners create a dysbiosis (microbe imbalance) in the body, which in turn creates glucose intolerance and insulin resistance—even in healthy human subjects! And these are the precursors for type 2 diabetes. In light of these findings, the authors are calling for a reassessment of our massive artificial sweetener usage.

One widely used NAS, aspartame (marketed under the names NutraSweet and Equal) is an ingredient in approximately 6,000 consumer foods and beverages sold worldwide, including diet sodas and other soft drinks, instant breakfasts, breath mints, cereals, sugar-free chewing gum, cocoa mixes, frozen desserts, gelatin desserts, juices, laxatives, chewable vitamin supplements, milk drinks, pharmaceutical drugs and supplements, shake mixes, tabletop sweeteners, teas, instant coffees, topping mixes, wine coolers and yogurt—and of course in those little packets on your restaurant table, next to the sugar.

Dr. Joseph Mercola calls aspartame “by far the most dangerous substance added to most foods today” and says it accounts for over 75% of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious, including seizures and death. A few of the ninety different documented symptoms range from headaches, seizures, and numbness to depression, breathing problems, memory loss, and weight gain (particularly ironic for a “diet” product!). Researchers have found that many illnesses may be triggered or worsened by aspartame, including brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lymphoma, and—another irony—diabetes.

This past spring, PepsiCo announced that Diet Pepsi and its other diet sodas will no longer contain aspartame due to “consumer perception” over its safety—and a decade of plummeting sales (see our article on how consumers are compelling Big Food make other major changes in this issue of Pulse).

Beginning last August, instead of aspartame, Diet Pepsi, Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi contained sucralose, another artificial sweetener commonly known as Splenda. This has proven to be a somewhat unpopular move with its customers, who say they don’t like the new taste.

The problem, however, is not that Splenda doesn’t taste as good. The problem is that it is dangerous too. As we reported in 2012, Splenda is simply chlorinated sugar—in chemical terms, a chlorocarbon. The idea behind this is that the body would no longer recognize it as sugar. But, as Johns Hopkins-trained physician and biochemist James Bowen, MD, points out, chlorine is “nature’s Doberman attack dog—a highly excitable, ferocious atomic element employed as a biocide in bleach, disinfectants, insecticide, WWI poison gas and hydrochloric acid.” Common chlorocarbons include chlordane and DDT, a product so harmful that it is now banned for agricultural use the world over.

Chlorocarbons like Splenda appear to attack the human nervous system and can produce cancer, birth defects, and immune system destruction. In test animals, Splenda produced swollen livers (as do all chlorocarbon poisons), calcified their kidneys, shrunk their thymus glands (the biological seat of immunity) and produced liver inflammation. A Duke University study found that Splenda alters gut microflora, reducing it by almost 50%.

That’s right: the science strongly suggests that Splenda actually kills our gut microbes, which essentially trashes our immune system.

Now, with studies indicating that all artificial sweeteners alter, damage, and destroy our microbiota, and create a metabolic disorder that leads to diabetes, obesity, and chronic illness, it’s time we recognize that Splenda is no fitting substitute for NutraSweet.

Please take a look at our new video on artificial sweeteners!

 

 

Action Alert! Send a message to the FDA and ask them to recall both aspartame and sucralose—the evidence clearly shows that artificial sweeteners present a grave danger to consumers. Please send your message immediately!

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One Fluid, the Other Frozen

Small and Organic Farmers Survive Latest Round of FDA Food Rulemaking

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Small and Organic Farmers Survive Latest Round of FDA Food Rulemaking

The US Food and Drug Administration has issued three more final rules (with two more to come next year) for the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). And it’s pretty good news.

When the FSMA was originally proposed in 2010, we and many other organizations were troubled. Small-farm and organic food advocates warned that the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork and other onerous requirements. The act was signed into law in 2011.

There are three finalized rules—one for produce, the others for food importers and foreign food facilities. The most significant rule, on produce safety,establishes standards for growing, harvesting, packing, and holding produce—standards that are supposed to work across the wide diversity of produce farms. These standards include requirements for water quality, employee health and hygiene, wild and domesticated animals, biological soil amendments of animal origin (such as compost and manure), and equipment, tools and buildings.

When this rule was still in draft form, we told you about how the FDA was decreeing that farmers would have to wait nine months between applying manure and harvesting. This would have taken many organic fields out of production for an entire growing season, economically crippling small farmers.

Happily, the FDA listened to the outcry from farmers and consumers alike, and as the agency promised to do several months ago, the FDA has now changed the rule: “At this time, the FDA does not object to farmers complying with the USDA’s National Organic Program standards, which call for a 120-day interval between the application of raw manure for crops in contact with the soil and 90 days for crops not in contact with the soil.” However, the FDA is currently conducting “a risk assessment and extensive research” on the number of days needed between the applications of raw manure and harvesting to minimize the risk of contamination, so this rule may change in the future.

As we reported in June, ANH-USA—together with the natural health community—helped win the inclusion of an amendment to FSMA from Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Kay Hagan (D-NC), which exempts producers making less than $500,000 a year in sales who also sold most of their food locally. This wasn’t easy. Big farms and processed food companies and their allies at the USDA and FDA did not like it—they feel threatened by competition from natural food producers (for more on this, see our article on how Big Food may be changing its tune in this issue of Pulse).

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One Fluid, the Other Frozen

Artificial Sweeteners Contribute to Diabetes

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Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One Fluid, the Other Frozen

As consumers demand safer and more natural foods, the market is starting to comply. So why doesn’t Big Medicine do the same? Action Alert!

Consumers, according to the New York Times, have been leaving Big Food in droves, and are increasingly buying organic (not to mention free-range, cage-free, grass-fed, and/or locally sourced) foods. After years of denial, some in the food industry have finally decided to actually listen to consumers:

General Mills will drop all artificial colors and flavors from its cereals. Perdue, Tyson and Foster Farm have begun to limit the use of antibiotics in their chicken. Kraft declared it was dropping artificial dyes from its macaroni and cheese. Hershey’s will begin to move away from ingredients such as the emulsifier polyglycerol polyricinoleate to “simple and easy-to-understand ingredients” like “fresh milk from local farms, roasted California almonds, cocoa beans and sugar”….Brands such as Amy’s Kitchen, with its organic products, and Kind bars are taking some of the space on shelves once consumed by Nestlé’s Lean Cuisine and Mars.

Food manufacturers are acquiring healthier brands (for example, last year General Mills purchased Annie’s Homegrown—famous for its organic mac and cheese—for $820 million, over four times the company’s current revenues, a huge price). They are also introducing a tremendous number of gluten-free products, although these typically are overloaded with sugar.

All of this represents some serious damage control. Soda sales are down by 25%—because people are learning about how unhealthy sodas are, and are drinking more water. Orange juice sales have dropped 45%. It wasn’t long ago that people thought orange juice to be a health food. Now they realize that flooding the system with fructose (fruit sugar) is not a good idea, even if it’s natural fructose. Eating oranges is entirely different because of the pulp, which slows down the intake of the sugar.

In addition, consumers are replacing packaged cereals with yogurt and granola. McDonald’s overall sales figures have been in a huge downward spiral for three years. Sales of raw fruits and vegetables are up 10%, and freshly prepared foods in grocery stores are up by nearly 30%, despite the high cost. Consumers are voting every time they make a purchase at the grocery store—and every vote counts.

So if Big Food is gradually bending to new kinds of consumer demand, why is Big Medicine still resisting any change at all?

When we refer to Big Medicine, we mean the American Medical Association (AMA), the medical professionals affiliated with them, big hospitals, the insurance industry, and medical device manufacturers. But we especially mean Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical industry. This industry earns immense profits, mostly fueled by government granted monopolies (patents and FDA approvals). It uses these profits to control not only Big Medicine but the FDA and other government arms including Congress and the White House.

Big Pharma pays lip service to “preventive medicine,” but this just means persuading doctors to prescribe more drugs and vaccines, especially to children and older people, even though these two groups are rarely included in drug trials.

Why is big medicine so immune to consumer influence? One reason is that since the advent of Medicare in the 1960s, government and insurance companies have paid more and more of the medical bills. Consumers sill pay them, but because the money is channeled through other parties, they lose their influence.

But this is changing for unexpected reasons. The drafters of Obamacare wanted to eliminate Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and other vehicles. After many voices, including ANH-USA’s, opposed this, the idea shifted to eliminating insurance policy deductibles, which would indirectly eliminate HSAs.

As we all know, deductibles did not decline. Instead they’ve recently skyrocketed. This is very hard on the poor and middle class, but ironically, has shifted more power to consumers.

Given that the consumer vote does matter, we have the following request: for the next three months, we’re asking you to make major changes in both your food and medical purchases. As much as you are able, make a concerted effort to choose only “real” foods, meals you have to actually cook yourself, containing the freshest, organic, sustainable ingredients you can find. No sodas, not even diet sodas (see our article on artificial sweeteners in this issue of Pulse). No fast food. Nothing overly processed.

Most of our readers will already be here, but try to take it to the next level.

In addition, talk to your physician or healthcare professional about finding healthier alternatives to prescription drugs. If they respond with a blank stare or rabid opposition, look for an integrative physician with assistance from our website. Let’s see how big a change we can really make in the food and medical industry!

In addition, two congressional representatives, Donald M. Payne, Jr. (D-NJ) and Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), co-chairs of the Congressional Men’s Health Caucus, understand the government’s intransigence and refusal to do more than pay lip service to health and wellness and decided to do something about it. They recently introduced a House resolution expressing support for health and wellness coaches.

This may seem like tokenism, but the AMA will not like it.

They regard health coaches as competition for their doctors. Let’s be sure that Congress knows someone other than the AMA is watching.

National Health and Wellness Coach Recognition Week will also be celebrated January 11-17, 2016.

Action Alert! Write to your representative and senators and ask them to support H. RES. 552 in support of health and wellness coaches and National Health and Wellness Coach Recognition Week. Please send your message today.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Small and Organic Farmers Survive Latest Round of FDA Food Rulemaking

Artificial Sweeteners Contribute to Diabetes

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Artificial Sweeteners Contribute to Diabetes

Microbes in our gastrointestinal tract power our immune systems and keep our insulin and blood sugar in balance. Aspartame and other manufactured no-calorie sweeteners are killing them. Action Alert!

Artificial sweeteners are among the most widely used food additives worldwide, regularly consumed by lean and obese individuals alike. Products containing artificial sweeteners bring in huge sales figures, and they’re touted as being a safe and healthful alternative to sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. The science, however, tells a different story.

An important study published in the journal Nature shows that all artificial sweeteners actually induce glucose intolerance, which leads to type 2 diabetes. A team of immunologists, molecular geneticists, and digestive tract disease specialists found that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners actually change the composition and function of our intestinal microbiota.

A microbiota is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space.” Joshua Lederberg coined the term to emphasize the importance of microorganisms inhabiting the human body in health and disease.

The research team identified sweetener-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to our susceptibility to metabolic disease. They also demonstrated how the sweeteners create a dysbiosis (microbe imbalance) in the body, which in turn creates glucose intolerance and insulin resistance—even in healthy human subjects! And these are the precursors for type 2 diabetes. In light of these findings, the authors are calling for a reassessment of our massive artificial sweetener usage.

One widely used NAS, aspartame (marketed under the names NutraSweet and Equal) is an ingredient in approximately 6,000 consumer foods and beverages sold worldwide, including diet sodas and other soft drinks, instant breakfasts, breath mints, cereals, sugar-free chewing gum, cocoa mixes, frozen desserts, gelatin desserts, juices, laxatives, chewable vitamin supplements, milk drinks, pharmaceutical drugs and supplements, shake mixes, tabletop sweeteners, teas, instant coffees, topping mixes, wine coolers and yogurt—and of course in those little packets on your restaurant table, next to the sugar.

Dr. Joseph Mercola calls aspartame “by far the most dangerous substance added to most foods today” and says it accounts for over 75% of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious, including seizures and death. A few of the ninety different documented symptoms range from headaches, seizures, and numbness to depression, breathing problems, memory loss, and weight gain (particularly ironic for a “diet” product!). Researchers have found that many illnesses may be triggered or worsened by aspartame, including brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lymphoma, and—another irony—diabetes.

This past spring, PepsiCo announced that Diet Pepsi and its other diet sodas will no longer contain aspartame due to “consumer perception” over its safety—and a decade of plummeting sales (see our article on how consumers are compelling Big Food make other major changes in this issue of Pulse).

Beginning last August, instead of aspartame, Diet Pepsi, Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi contained sucralose, another artificial sweetener commonly known as Splenda. This has proven to be a somewhat unpopular move with its customers, who say they don’t like the new taste.

The problem, however, is not that Splenda doesn’t taste as good. The problem is that it is dangerous too. As we reported in 2012, Splenda is simply chlorinated sugar—in chemical terms, a chlorocarbon. The idea behind this is that the body would no longer recognize it as sugar. But, as Johns Hopkins-trained physician and biochemist James Bowen, MD, points out, chlorine is “nature’s Doberman attack dog—a highly excitable, ferocious atomic element employed as a biocide in bleach, disinfectants, insecticide, WWI poison gas and hydrochloric acid.” Common chlorocarbons include chlordane and DDT, a product so harmful that it is now banned for agricultural use the world over.

Chlorocarbons like Splenda appear to attack the human nervous system and can produce cancer, birth defects, and immune system destruction. In test animals, Splenda produced swollen livers (as do all chlorocarbon poisons), calcified their kidneys, shrunk their thymus glands (the biological seat of immunity) and produced liver inflammation. A Duke University study found that Splenda alters gut microflora, reducing it by almost 50%.

That’s right: the science strongly suggests that Splenda actually kills our gut microbes, which essentially trashes our immune system.

Now, with studies indicating that all artificial sweeteners alter, damage, and destroy our microbiota, and create a metabolic disorder that leads to diabetes, obesity, and chronic illness, it’s time we recognize that Splenda is no fitting substitute for NutraSweet.

Please take a look at our new video on artificial sweeteners!

 

 

Action Alert! Send a message to the FDA and ask them to recall both aspartame and sucralose—the evidence clearly shows that artificial sweeteners present a grave danger to consumers. Please send your message immediately!

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One Fluid, the Other Frozen

Small and Organic Farmers Survive Latest Round of FDA Food Rulemaking

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