I agree with you about the risks of needles though (including to medical staff who work around sharps and could accidentally get stuck by one and get a disease like AIDS). However, ultrasound may have its own risks, too. Have you ever run a stream of water into a sink and had one drop bounce out of the sink from some weird interaction of waves giving some small amount of water a much higher velocity than the total stream? Waves can interact "constructively" in odd ways in relation to resonance and other concepts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(wave_propagation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
Whenever you inject macroscale energy into a system, whatever the form (heat, light, sound, etc.), you run the risk of resonance effects or other effects causing microscale damage. As another example, heat up the planet Earth, and you may get more hurricanes that rip the roofs off homes.
It's a question of risk vs. reward and for whom. Something does not have to be perfect to be better. The important thing is to fully understand the various tradeoffs and make informed decisions. It may well be that any risks from ultrasonic transdermal delivery of drugs may outweigh any risks relative to other options. Although, I'd still suggest eating better and having a healthier lifestyle and so on is, in general, better than taking drugs to paper cover up the symptoms of vegetable deficiency disease and sunlight deficiency disease. Like Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, a typical prescription is taken by most people as a "permission slip" to keep eating poorly or doing other problematical lifestyle things.
Sorry, but you and whoever modded that post down missed the point. There is an apparent affect where imploding small bubbles in liquid can cause nuclear fusion or some similar process involving very hot temperatures like the surface of the sun and so possibly emit radiation as evidenced by the production of light (although the details remain controversial). Ultrasonic sound waves can apparently cause such small bubbles, and so the proposed idea of injecting drugs using ultrasonic waves to cause small bubble may be a potential radiation risk. From the wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion "Bubble fusion, also known as sonofusion, is the non-technical name for a nuclear fusion reaction hypothesized to occur during a high-pressure version of sonoluminescence, an extreme form of acoustic cavitation.[1] The mechanism of sonofusion was proposed in 2002 by Rusi Taleyarkhan. Experiments in following years have produced conflicting results about whether it is possible to cause a fusion reaction with this method."
And this supports the original poster's point about free radical damage. Maybe free radicals are caused by radiation from the imploding bubbles?
If you want to learn more about bubbles and possible radiation, watch this youtube video about snapping "Pistol Shrimp", who use the effect to stun prey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeFUO2F7Gvw
So the question is, could this be happening in this attempt to inject medicine via ultrasonics? Compare what is quoted above from Wikipeida with this part of the summary of the original article: "When ultrasound waves travel through a fluid, they create tiny bubbles that move chaotically. Once the bubbles reach a certain size, they become unstable and implode. Surrounding fluid rushes into the empty space, generating high-speed 'microjets' of fluid that create microscopic abrasions on the skin."
Am I saying typical ultrasounds used for diagnostic imaging produce this sonofusion effect? No. Although now that you bring the issue up, maybe they can?
By the way, as far as ultrasound and the developing human brain and ear related to ultrasounds performed during pregnancy, even without radiation issues, consider: "Prenatal exposure to ultrasound waves impacts neuronal migration in mice" http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12903.full
What are the implications? http://www.naturalchild.org/research/yale_ultrasound.html "Physicians should continue to be prudent about the use of ultrasound and perform the study only when medically necessary and when benefits outweigh risk, according to the American College of Radiology. The advice comes in the wake of recent findings by Yale researchers that link prenatal ultrasound exposure to brain damage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket "War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.... It contains this key summary:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." "
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"?:-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society: "Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po
And: http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/ "Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben
"Since quite a lot of electrical energy is used to create thermal energy in the regular course of business naturally this means that peak computation electrical energy efficiency can be improved not just by increasing the computations per KWh but also by putting the computation in the place where you wanted the thermal energy anyway, or using the thermal energy once you have it for some other purpose. That way you get to use the same watt twice at no additional cost."
A related idea I had: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344998&cid=36859662 "(I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding.:-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "
"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."
So true. Something I posted in 2001: "License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?" https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y "My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"
I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...
Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out... http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
This health disaster was made in part by a US RDA for vitamin D that was more than ten times too low for pregnant women, coupled with dermatologists and pediatricians frightening all parents about sun exposure for their children as creating a later in life risk for (generally easily treatable) skin cancer. Those two things together, along with an increasingly indoor lifestyle from all the fancy gadgets we have, have cause a expensive health disaster of unprecedented proportions in all industrialized countries. And it is not just autism, it is also cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and others. Diet is part of that too though, but lack of sunlight (or proper supplements) is the single worst part that is easiest to fix.
The La Leche league (pro-breastfeeding) also contributed to the disaster with saying "breast is best" while ignoring that if the mother was vitamin D deficient, she could not pass enough on to her children via breast milk. The have recently been improving on that score, but only after a vast number of children were harmed. Vitamin D was probably one of the few things infant formula got right (as bad as formula is in many other ways).
So, in that sense it was the most conscientious up-to-date parents, listening to their doctors and the government, that have been hardest hit by this disaster. The parents who did not pay attention to the dermatologists, who got sun tans themselves, who let their kids play in the sun a lot anyway like the parents did when they were young, their kids were probably better off in this sense. That is not exactly the irony you mentioned (various synthetic chemicals can indeed be bad for the health, especially as endocrine disruptors), but it is related.
By the way, 100 years ago pretty much most of what most people ate was organic and vegetarian, so it is hard to call that kind of diet "modern" or a "fad". It is precisely because it is what humans are adapted for which is why it is healthiest to eat that way. What is modern and a fad is eating lots of fatty factory-farmed meat raised on pesticide-laden grains and eating lots of refined starches and sugars and eating stuff with artificial colors and such. In the past, only the very richest could afford that fancy stuff, and eating that way produced the diseases of kings, like heart disease, diabetes, gout, cancer, etc.. Now almost everyone in the industrialized world suffers from the diseases of kings, with most of us stuck in "the pleasure trap": http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Or: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
To raise the stakes a bit to a disease that affects many more people than Fibromyalgia, I'd be curious what you thought about the following cited study and Fuhrman's comments on the implications for the scientific basis of the multi-billion dollar industry of cardiac surgery vs. nutritional interventions? http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner. Trikalinos TA, Alsheikh-Ali AA, Tatsioni A, et al. Percutaneous coronary interventions for non-acute coronary artery disease: a quantitative 20-year synopsis and a network meta-analysis. Lancet 2009; 373(9667):911-918."
I wish I had known all this over a decade ago before my father went through an invasive angioplasty and stent emplacement procedure and died some few months afterwards of a heart attack it was supposed to prevent. After reading that study, would you let an MD perform an angioplasty procedure and put a stent in you or a loved one under typical circumstances for heart disease? Or might you instead opt for aggressive nutritional intervention like Fuhrman does with his patients? Or maybe do something else?
Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.
On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm ===== "We need competition in order to survive." "Life is boring without competition." "It is competition that gives us meaning in life." These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource. ====
Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends. http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets.:-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html "Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity."
Many become deficient in Omega-3s, Iodine, and B12. Of course, when a meat eater dies at 65 of a heart attack, we commonly blamd the the "genes". When a Vegan dies for whatever reason, we blame the "diet". In reality, it is an interactio of diet, lifestyle, and genes. As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us "weak links", but whether they get pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle.
We need a new term for someone who eats a lot of vegetables and other high-nutrient foods and avoids junk foods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term "Nutritarian" for that, but it is not in widespread use. And as he says, eating lots of vegetables and a little meat is much healthier than a diet that is full of refined grains and processed sugar.
Thanks for your insightful post, including the humor and insights into psychology and health.:-)
Humans were not adapted to a world full of refined sugar, refined starch, salt everywhere, easy-to-get fats, and so on. Our natural inclinations are geared to a world where such are rare and we have to work physically at a moderate level every day to get something to eat.
Yet the modern food industry profits from just giving us what our genes say we should have as much of as we can because it is historically rare. But now that is is not rare, it is literally destroying our health. And pleading for individual self-control goes against our genetically-based survival strategies to eat the richest food first. Thus in industrialized countries, we now almost all suffer from the "diseases of kings" from the past cause by such a diet -- diabetes, gout, heart disease, stroke, dementia, etc... And even autism in the case of people (especially pregnant women) who no longer need to go outdoors in the sunshine for many hours every day.
And sadly, on extremes and addiction: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html "The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.... Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly...."
Maybe we need to find healthy addictions before the unhealthy ones find us?
Here is what Fuhrman stated in the part I quoted: "I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success.... Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] "
Here is that footnoted section with *three* studies cited (I added carriage returns to make it clearer there are three studies): [ii] Kaartinen K, Lammi K, Hypen M, et al. Vegan diet alleviates fibromyalgia symptoms. Scand J Rheumatol 2000;29(5):308-13. Donaldson MS; Speight N; Loomis Fibromyalgia syndrome improved using a mostly raw vegetarian diet: an observational study. BMC Complement Altern Med 2001;1(1):7. Hanninen, Kaartinen K, Rauma AL, et al. Antioxidants in vegan diet and rheumatic disorders. Toxicology 2000 Nov 30;155(1-3):45-53."
So, whatever you think of all three studies (including conflicts of interests in the second), and Fibromyalgia falls into the class of "rheumatic disorders" related to the third, your statement that he cites only one study is inaccurate. Yet you got modded +5 informative for making a strongly worded assertion that is easily disprovable by looking at the original source. Not sure how to interpret that as far as slashdotters and cargo cult science.:-)
For what is is worth, vitamin D and eating more veggies also greatly improved my own joint pain, so there is another anecdote you can dismiss. But that helps explains why I'm more willing to believe such studies -- I tried them and they worked for me. However, such advice also makes evolutionary sense, assuming humans are adapted to a life in the sun eating mostly a variety of vegetables (and maybe a bit of "free range organic" animal products like termites and fish of the purer sort available 100,000 years ago but rare now, as even Gorillas eat termites). In general, eating that way reduces the risk of being "suddenly dead" from strokes and heart attacks. Hopefully after reviewing the three references, and then looking at the many more he cites elsewhere, you might revise your opinion eventually? But even if not, good luck in finding what works for you to bring you abundant good health.
Maybe that is not the best study in the world, but you seem to me to be ignoring the context here. I was originally responding to a comment that included stuff on asthma, allergies, and fibromyalgia. The page I am citing and the references covers many allergies, and fibromyalgia in that context (fibromyalgia in practice perhaps often being a catch-all phrase for joint pain which can have multiple causes). Also, you are just out of hand dismissing an MD's report on his own decades of clinical experience. And that experience is also reflected by reports by others, if you look around. It is just not extremely profitable or easy advice to give in this society, compared to pill pushing and surgery selling.
And: "5 Ways To Control Fibromyalgia With Diet: New research shows that picking these foods may ease pain" http://www.prevention.com/node/27278 http://www.prevention.com/health/health-concerns/5-ways-control-fibromyalgia-diet/5-veg-out "Some researchers speculate that oxidative stress may be a cause of fibro symptoms. Oxidative stress occurs when the body doesnâ(TM)t produce enough antioxidants to battle cell-damaging free radicals in the body. Most fruits and veggies are packed with important antioxidants, like vitamins A, C, and E, which fight free radicals to keep your body normalized. Certain studies also show a raw, vegan diet can improve symptoms, but thatâ(TM)s difficult for most people to follow. If you do choose to eat meat, though, opt for a small portion of grass-fed beef. "It is an excellent source of iron and vitamin B12, both nutrients which are extremely important in keeping your pain-processing nervous system healthy," says Holton."
The scientific enterprise in our society is so messed up in so many ways, as reflected in the quotes I collected here; one example: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science "In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased searc
...both of the library variety and the hands-on variety in his practice. He cites thousands of reference sin his book "Eat to Live" and has had thousands of patients over his career.
Yet your post got modded +5 insightful. Still so much mis-info on slashdot about health... But I still feel it is slowly improving. And you are reasonable to be skeptical.
None-the-less, if you truly are a hard-working skeptic and not just a lazy skeptic-of-just-new-ideas, the entire scientific enterprise has failed in several big ways in relation to medicine, as I quote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
So, it is hard to move beyond that. Look at what happened to the guy who suggested doctors wash their hands after dissecting corpses before they then deliver babies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis ".. As a result, his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other more subtle factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.[7]:9[Note 6]
Specifically, Semmelweis's claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later, when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others.
During 1848, Semmelweis widened the scope of his washing protocol, to include all instruments coming in contact with patients in labour, and used mortality rates time series to document his success in virtually eliminating puerperal fever from the hospital ward....
In 1865 JÃnos Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution.... He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, possibly caused by the beating...."
Who are the real charlatans of medicine? http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who
There are twelve references cited on that page. There are thousands more cited in Dr. Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live". Why do people (myself included in the past) have such a hard time accepting there is any connection between what they eat and their health? If you fed a monkey only sugar water for years and it went crazy and its fur started falling out, would you say the way to bring it back to health is to give it prescription drugs along with the sugar water?
Evan vegan diets can be messed up with too much refined sugar and refined starch, btw: http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html "Dr. Fuhrman: Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity.
The second serious error of the vegan community is the heavy use of fake meat and cheese analogues usually made from soy and almost always high in salt. Besides the lack of nutrients and high levels of acrylamides in these highly processed foods, with continuation of the high salt diet hemorrhagic strokes are even more likely in a vegan than in a person on a heart-disease promoting diet rich in animal products. Consuming salted foods should not be taken lightly; it is a killer.
The third error common in the vegan community is the lack of concern for individual differences which may heighten nutritional requirements in some individuals, especially the elderly, which make it advisable to supplement when appropriate with Vitamin D, B12, Taurine, DHA, or iodine, for example, to assure that no one develops a medical condition as a result of sub-optimal nutritional intake. To better assure nutritional completeness I recommend to my patients my vegan multi Gentle Care Formula and my vegan DHA Purity, and then if not getting regular sunshine to also add a Vitamin D supplement. Many vegans think supplementing with B12 is enough to guarantee nutritional excellence for most people. Long-term nutritional deficiencies are not harmless. Omnivores develop deficiencies, too, and blood tests can be used to ascertain if deficiencies exist."
Eating meat poses at least six big problems: * the environmental impact & resource usage * e-coli from manure runoff contaminating vegetables * the cruelty of factory farming * meat has few plant-based phytonutrients your body needs to work well and resists cancer (though it can have some essential nutrients like omega-3s if it is a high quality meat, which is rare these days). * animals typically eaten in the USA are fed non-organic grain with various pesticides on it and other toxins, the animals then concentrate those toxins in their fat which they eat 10X grain to make per calorie, so when you eat typical US meat product, you are getting potentially up to 100X the exposure to pesticides than a vegan eating organic veggies. * When you cook meat, you usually produce cancer causing acrylamides.
So, with standard meat, you both get more exposure to cancer-causing compounds and you get less phytonutrients to fight cancer. Plus you undermine our collective future environmentally and morally. So, in the long term, that all undermines your health. None-the-less, Fuhrman is not a total extremist on such things -- he says as long as 90% of you calories are from what he recommends, you will get most of the benefits.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
Our tax dollars at work.:-( And then a lot of the rest of our tax dollars go pay to deal with the medical consequences... And then even more tax dollars go to pay for the cultural and psychological consequences (including aggressiveness and poor thinking) that also flow from poor nutrition: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime "Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat; Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
If you had looked at that web page, you woudl have seen a list of references at the end: [i] Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, et al. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol 2002 Dec;138(12):1584-90 [ii] Kaartinen K, Lammi K, Hypen M, et al. Vegan diet alleviates fibromyalgia symptoms. Scand J Rheumatol 2000;29(5):308-13. Donaldson MS; Speight N; Loomis Fibromyalgia syndrome improved using a mostly raw vegetarian diet: an observational study. BMC Complement Altern Med 2001;1(1):7. Hanninen, Kaartinen K, Rauma AL, et al. Antioxidants in vegan diet and rheumatic disorders. Toxicology 2000 Nov 30;155(1-3):45-53. [iii]Shaheen SO, Sterne JA, Thompson RL, et al. Dietary antioxidants and asthma in adults: population-based case-control study. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2001;164(10 Pt 1):1823-8. [iv] Huang SL, Lin KC, Pan WH. Dietary factors associated with physician-diagnosed asthma and allergic rhinitis in teenagers: analyses of the first Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan. Clin Exp Allergy 2001 Feb;31(2):259-64. [v]Seaton A, Devereux G. Diet, infection and wheezy illness: lessons from adults. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2000;11 Suppl 13:37-40. [vi] Oddy WH; de Klerk NH; Kendall GE et al. Ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids and childhood asthma. J Asthma 2004;41(3):319-26. [vii] Huang SL, Pan WH. Dietary fats and asthma in teenagers: analyses of the first Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan (NAHSIT). Clin Exp Allergy 2001 Dec;31(12):1875-80. [viii] Farchi S, Forastiere F, Agabiti N, et al. Dietary factors associated with wheezing and allergic rhinitis in children. Eur Respir J 2003 Nov;22(5):772-80. [ix] Scott D, Symmons DP, Coulton BL, Popert AJ. Long-term outcome of treating rheumatoid arthritis: results after 20 years. Lancet 1987;1(8542):1108-1111. [x] Jones M, Symmons, Finn J, Wolfe F. Does exposure to immunosuppressive therapy increase the 10 year malignancy and mortality risk? British Journal of Rheumatology 1996; 35(8):738-745. [xi]Fuhrman J, Sarter, B, Calabro DJ. Case Studies of Medically Supervised Water-only Fasting Resulting in Remission of Autoimmune Disease. Alternative Therapies 2001;8(4):1-3. [xii] Kjeldsen-Kragh J, Hvatum M, Haugen M, Forre O, Scott H. Antibodies against dietary antigens in rheumatoid arthritis patents treated with fasting and a one-year vegetarian diet. Clin Exp Rheumatol 1995;13(2):167-172.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
BTW, eating more veggies can help with the some of the disease you mentioned: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx "Fibromyalgia is a disease highlighted by discomfort, pain and tenderness all over the body. The cause is unknown. Typical treatments involve pain medication and anti-depressants used to aid sleep. Better sleep has been shown to be of benefit.
I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. Acrylamides are toxic substances produced by baking and frying carbohydrates. The diet-style I recommend for fibromylagia patients is rich in natural plant foods especially organic berries and green vegetables and restricted in animal products and baked grains. Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are encouraged. Fibromyalgia patients routinely get well, and they get well quickly.
Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] Though the researchers do not seem to have the experience and understanding of why what they are doing works, the effects are dramatic.
Similar to the nutritional treatment of most diseases, it is not one photochemical compound or the removal of one toxic habit that works; it is the symphonic combination of removing multiple nutritional stresses along with the addition of multiple beneficial nutritional compounds that results in consistent and sustained results. The high intake of polyphenolic compounds such as quercetin, myricetin and kaempherol, and the high intake of lignans and bioflavonoids are just a few of the hundreds of nutrients with unpronounceable names that can only be obtained in large amounts from a diet rich in natural plant foods."
It sounds from those two sources like many cases of autism could be prevented by higher vitamin D levels of pregnant women and better diet, but in the first few years of life after birth, some aspects of autism can be reversed with vitamin D supplements and good diet. How far and for how many kids is still an open question.
"And you only need five minutes of sun light to completely restore vitamin D levels in the body. kids stand outside waiting on the bus longer than that."
I know that is what we have all been taught in school in past years. The problem is it is not true. Following that advice will lead to severe health problems. Here are better recommendations: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
For a light skinned adult human in a (skimpy) bathing suit under peak noon-day sun, that person will produce about 20,000 IU vitamin D (about 30X the US RDA) in about twenty minutes. For someone with dark skin, that will take two to four hours in a bathing suit. Any excess vitamin D beyond that will be broken down into other compounds that we don't yet fully understand the significance of (but may have health value). Meanwhile, the body slowly charges its fat soluble stores of vitamin D. But you may need to do that for months to saturate the body to the point where it will have a six to nine months supply (maybe longer or shorter) where you could go the winter without supplements.
For about half the year in more Northern latitudes, your body will not make any vitamin D at any time of day because the angle of the sun through the atmosphere means too much UV-B is absorbed for it to have much affect on your skin. Similarly, outside of peak sun hours, there is much less vitamin D produced.
So, while I was taught the same thing you said growing up, that even in winter your face or hands would produce enough vitamin D to get by, it just is not true. And that has serious implications. For example: "Blacks more likely to die from cancer because of vitamin D deficiency, study finally admits" http://www.naturalnews.com/036181_blacks_vitamin_D_deficiency_cancer.html
And on top of that, dermatologists and those who would sell cosmetics and sun screens scare people about sun exposure without telling them to supplement with vitamin D if they avoid the sun. And even if they told them to supplement, the US RDA is about ten times too low for adults (and in any case, you need a blood test to be sure of levels as different people respond differently to supplements). For children the RDA is also fairly low. For infants the RDA is OK. Basically, the RDA is almost the same for all these ages, but since vitamin D needs correspond somewhat to weight, that is why the child and adult levels are too low.
So that is why keeping kids indoor more will destroy their health (unless they take supplemental vitamin D, and even then, we don't fully understand all the supplementation issues). Many schools have already removed recess outdoors in order to have more time for in-chair paper-pushing academic work, and yet ironically the lack of exercise and sunlight may have decreased test scores as it decreases a child's general physical and mental health.
"Schools are not going anywhere. The need for social interaction while learning is common to all peop
Please look at the link you supplied: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Toxicity "For infants (birth to 12 months), the tolerable upper limit (maximum amount that can be tolerated without harm) is set at 25 micrograms/day (1000 IU). One thousand micrograms (40,000 IU) per day in infants has produced toxicity within one month.[80]"
So, after some body gave an infant 100X the RDA every day for a month, the infant showed signs of toxicity. I'd venture the signs of toxicity probably went away when they stopped supplementing (given the examples I cites about East German infants getting massive doses and going on to win the Olympics). If an infant 100X the RDA for iron, in one day they might be dead? Based on that comparison, vitamin D is a very safe supplement for children. The health consequences of getting one tenth the RDA are far greater than getting 10X the RDA. Error here is much better on the side of abundance.
Still, for infants, I'd agree the US RDA is more or less correct, and there is probably no reason to ever give an amount about the RDA. Based on what I've cited from Dr. John Cannell's writings, the fears of what happens near that limit are overblown. And the "official" recommendations remain way too low for adults, as it is not much more than infants, and your comparisons while plausible sounding don't match the science, because vitamin D is used in every cell for signaling more than for "growth". (Even ignoring the RDAs are just probably wrong for lots of things -- his chatter on RDAs is all too true: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=329928 )
The bottom line is that humans are adapted to a life outdoors in the sun. That includes pregnant women getting enough sun. We deviate from that norm at the risk of our own health, and it is only in the past few decades that so many of us have become indoor creatures, with health consequences probably including autism. Some culture clashes even make that worse, like devout Somali Muslim women moving from near the equator where they lived in houses with open courtyards to northern latitudes around Minneapolis where they stay indoors all the times and wear a Burka otherwise, and then people wonder why so many of their children are autistic (as they do not know yet to supplement with 6000 IU D3 daily when pregnant and nursing): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism "What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism? A few researchers are turning their attention to the sunshine vitamin as a culprit, prompted by the experience of immigrants that have moved from their equatorial country to two northern latitude locations"
P.S. I did not call you an "idiot" that I could see. But on this one issue, you are certainly echoing the conventional wisdom that has caused so much suffering over the past few decades (including bad advice we got from our own pediatrician). Good luck in finding the right amount of vitamin D3 that works for you and your family.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also: "In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness" http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm "As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."
If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
Slashdot Mirror
"If this was marketed at a consumer level one day, it could mean that diabetic patients wouldn't have to poke themselves on a daily basis anymore"
Or most Type-2 diabetics could just eat more vegetables and get enough vitamin D: :-)
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/diabetes-and-endocrine-diseases/diabetes-type-2/
And pregnant women and infants could get enought vitamin D and may prevent Type-1 cases:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/diabetes-and-endocrine-diseases/diabetes-type-1/
I agree with you about the risks of needles though (including to medical staff who work around sharps and could accidentally get stuck by one and get a disease like AIDS). However, ultrasound may have its own risks, too. Have you ever run a stream of water into a sink and had one drop bounce out of the sink from some weird interaction of waves giving some small amount of water a much higher velocity than the total stream? Waves can interact "constructively" in odd ways in relation to resonance and other concepts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(wave_propagation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
Whenever you inject macroscale energy into a system, whatever the form (heat, light, sound, etc.), you run the risk of resonance effects or other effects causing microscale damage. As another example, heat up the planet Earth, and you may get more hurricanes that rip the roofs off homes.
It's a question of risk vs. reward and for whom. Something does not have to be perfect to be better. The important thing is to fully understand the various tradeoffs and make informed decisions. It may well be that any risks from ultrasonic transdermal delivery of drugs may outweigh any risks relative to other options. Although, I'd still suggest eating better and having a healthier lifestyle and so on is, in general, better than taking drugs to paper cover up the symptoms of vegetable deficiency disease and sunlight deficiency disease. Like Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, a typical prescription is taken by most people as a "permission slip" to keep eating poorly or doing other problematical lifestyle things.
Sorry, but you and whoever modded that post down missed the point. There is an apparent affect where imploding small bubbles in liquid can cause nuclear fusion or some similar process involving very hot temperatures like the surface of the sun and so possibly emit radiation as evidenced by the production of light (although the details remain controversial). Ultrasonic sound waves can apparently cause such small bubbles, and so the proposed idea of injecting drugs using ultrasonic waves to cause small bubble may be a potential radiation risk. From the wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
"Bubble fusion, also known as sonofusion, is the non-technical name for a nuclear fusion reaction hypothesized to occur during a high-pressure version of sonoluminescence, an extreme form of acoustic cavitation.[1] The mechanism of sonofusion was proposed in 2002 by Rusi Taleyarkhan. Experiments in following years have produced conflicting results about whether it is possible to cause a fusion reaction with this method."
Emphasis being on "nuclear fusion".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence#Nuclear_reactions
And this supports the original poster's point about free radical damage. Maybe free radicals are caused by radiation from the imploding bubbles?
If you want to learn more about bubbles and possible radiation, watch this youtube video about snapping "Pistol Shrimp", who use the effect to stun prey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeFUO2F7Gvw
So the question is, could this be happening in this attempt to inject medicine via ultrasonics? Compare what is quoted above from Wikipeida with this part of the summary of the original article: "When ultrasound waves travel through a fluid, they create tiny bubbles that move chaotically. Once the bubbles reach a certain size, they become unstable and implode. Surrounding fluid rushes into the empty space, generating high-speed 'microjets' of fluid that create microscopic abrasions on the skin."
Imploding bubbles are referenced in both.
Of course, many mainstream physicists may find this idea of bubble fusion heretical, same as they object to the idea that nuclear processes can go on at the surface of a metal lattice (or maybe inside one):
http://pesn.com/2012/09/06/9602177_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_September6/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/05/11/184239/bubble-fusion-researcher-faces-fraud-trial
http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/1117201/bubble-fusion-results-replicated-by-4-institutions?sdsrc=rel
Am I saying typical ultrasounds used for diagnostic imaging produce this sonofusion effect? No. Although now that you bring the issue up, maybe they can?
By the way, as far as ultrasound and the developing human brain and ear related to ultrasounds performed during pregnancy, even without radiation issues, consider:
"Prenatal exposure to ultrasound waves impacts neuronal migration in mice"
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12903.full
What are the implications?
http://www.naturalchild.org/research/yale_ultrasound.html
"Physicians should continue to be prudent about the use of ultrasound and perform the study only when medically necessary and when benefits outweigh risk, according to the American College of Radiology. The advice comes in the wake of recent findings by Yale researchers that link prenatal ultrasound exposure to brain damage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Cavitation
http://www.articlesextra.com/cavitation-fusion-nuclear.htm
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/brillouin-funded-for-2-million-and.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket ... It contains this key summary:
"War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." "
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
However this could be fixed in our society with a basic income (and/or other changes):
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"? :-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society:
"Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po
And:
http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/
"Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben
Too late. :-) But it has been disclosed so that others can not patent it.
"Since quite a lot of electrical energy is used to create thermal energy in the regular course of business naturally this means that peak computation electrical energy efficiency can be improved not just by increasing the computations per KWh but also by putting the computation in the place where you wanted the thermal energy anyway, or using the thermal energy once you have it for some other purpose. That way you get to use the same watt twice at no additional cost."
A related idea I had: :-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344998&cid=36859662
"(I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding.
This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "
"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."
So true. Something I posted in 2001:
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y
"My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"
Also, where I hypothesized millions of US citizens arrested over copyright, same as now for marijuana: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...
Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out...
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
This book has a section on why goods with low incremental costs for distribution should be free according to the authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
A "basic income" could fund creators rather than copyright monopolies...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
that may be the worst offenders: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
This health disaster was made in part by a US RDA for vitamin D that was more than ten times too low for pregnant women, coupled with dermatologists and pediatricians frightening all parents about sun exposure for their children as creating a later in life risk for (generally easily treatable) skin cancer. Those two things together, along with an increasingly indoor lifestyle from all the fancy gadgets we have, have cause a expensive health disaster of unprecedented proportions in all industrialized countries. And it is not just autism, it is also cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and others. Diet is part of that too though, but lack of sunlight (or proper supplements) is the single worst part that is easiest to fix.
The La Leche league (pro-breastfeeding) also contributed to the disaster with saying "breast is best" while ignoring that if the mother was vitamin D deficient, she could not pass enough on to her children via breast milk. The have recently been improving on that score, but only after a vast number of children were harmed. Vitamin D was probably one of the few things infant formula got right (as bad as formula is in many other ways).
So, in that sense it was the most conscientious up-to-date parents, listening to their doctors and the government, that have been hardest hit by this disaster. The parents who did not pay attention to the dermatologists, who got sun tans themselves, who let their kids play in the sun a lot anyway like the parents did when they were young, their kids were probably better off in this sense. That is not exactly the irony you mentioned (various synthetic chemicals can indeed be bad for the health, especially as endocrine disruptors), but it is related.
See also:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
By the way, 100 years ago pretty much most of what most people ate was organic and vegetarian, so it is hard to call that kind of diet "modern" or a "fad". It is precisely because it is what humans are adapted for which is why it is healthiest to eat that way. What is modern and a fad is eating lots of fatty factory-farmed meat raised on pesticide-laden grains and eating lots of refined starches and sugars and eating stuff with artificial colors and such. In the past, only the very richest could afford that fancy stuff, and eating that way produced the diseases of kings, like heart disease, diabetes, gout, cancer, etc.. Now almost everyone in the industrialized world suffers from the diseases of kings, with most of us stuck in "the pleasure trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Thanks for the additional feedback, even as you are still discounting that this also reflects what Fuhrman and his colleagues have seen in clinical practice across a broad range of disease, and that there is essentially very-little-to-no funding to trial non-patentable medical interventions. Many medical interventions do not have "gold standard" double blind scientific support, and often as not it seems such expensive studies can't be replicated anyway -- even in the rare cases when someone can get funding just to duplicate an existing study,.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/139231/majority-of-landmark-cancer-studies-cannot-be-replicated
http://www.businessinsider.com/reproducibility-initiative-study-replication-2012-8
Or:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
To raise the stakes a bit to a disease that affects many more people than Fibromyalgia, I'd be curious what you thought about the following cited study and Fuhrman's comments on the implications for the scientific basis of the multi-billion dollar industry of cardiac surgery vs. nutritional interventions?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner.
Trikalinos TA, Alsheikh-Ali AA, Tatsioni A, et al. Percutaneous coronary interventions for non-acute coronary artery disease: a quantitative 20-year synopsis and a network meta-analysis. Lancet 2009; 373(9667):911-918."
A link on that study:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60319-6/abstract
"Sequential innovations in the catheter-based treatment of non-acute coronary artery disease showed no evidence of an effect on death or myocardial infarction when compared with medical therapy."
I wish I had known all this over a decade ago before my father went through an invasive angioplasty and stent emplacement procedure and died some few months afterwards of a heart attack it was supposed to prevent. After reading that study, would you let an MD perform an angioplasty procedure and put a stent in you or a loved one under typical circumstances for heart disease? Or might you instead opt for aggressive nutritional intervention like Fuhrman does with his patients? Or maybe do something else?
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.
On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
====
Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity."
Many become deficient in Omega-3s, Iodine, and B12. Of course, when a meat eater dies at 65 of a heart attack, we commonly blamd the the "genes". When a Vegan dies for whatever reason, we blame the "diet". In reality, it is an interactio of diet, lifestyle, and genes. As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us "weak links", but whether they get pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle.
We need a new term for someone who eats a lot of vegetables and other high-nutrient foods and avoids junk foods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term "Nutritarian" for that, but it is not in widespread use. And as he says, eating lots of vegetables and a little meat is much healthier than a diet that is full of refined grains and processed sugar.
Thanks for your insightful post, including the humor and insights into psychology and health. :-)
On finding balance, see stuff on "the pleasure trap", which can make balance hard to achieve sometimes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Humans were not adapted to a world full of refined sugar, refined starch, salt everywhere, easy-to-get fats, and so on. Our natural inclinations are geared to a world where such are rare and we have to work physically at a moderate level every day to get something to eat.
Yet the modern food industry profits from just giving us what our genes say we should have as much of as we can because it is historically rare. But now that is is not rare, it is literally destroying our health. And pleading for individual self-control goes against our genetically-based survival strategies to eat the richest food first. Thus in industrialized countries, we now almost all suffer from the "diseases of kings" from the past cause by such a diet -- diabetes, gout, heart disease, stroke, dementia, etc... And even autism in the case of people (especially pregnant women) who no longer need to go outdoors in the sunshine for many hours every day.
And sadly, on extremes and addiction: ... Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ..."
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.
Maybe we need to find healthy addictions before the unhealthy ones find us?
Here is what Fuhrman stated in the part I quoted: "I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. ... Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] "
Here is that footnoted section with *three* studies cited (I added carriage returns to make it clearer there are three studies):
[ii] Kaartinen K, Lammi K, Hypen M, et al. Vegan diet alleviates fibromyalgia symptoms. Scand J Rheumatol 2000;29(5):308-13.
Donaldson MS; Speight N; Loomis Fibromyalgia syndrome improved using a mostly raw vegetarian diet: an observational study. BMC Complement Altern Med 2001;1(1):7.
Hanninen, Kaartinen K, Rauma AL, et al. Antioxidants in vegan diet and rheumatic disorders. Toxicology 2000 Nov 30;155(1-3):45-53."
The one you refere to is actually from "Scand J Rheumatol. 2000;29(5):308-13."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11093597
not "BMC Complement Altern Med 2001":
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC57816/
The third BTW:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11156742
So, whatever you think of all three studies (including conflicts of interests in the second), and Fibromyalgia falls into the class of "rheumatic disorders" related to the third, your statement that he cites only one study is inaccurate. Yet you got modded +5 informative for making a strongly worded assertion that is easily disprovable by looking at the original source. Not sure how to interpret that as far as slashdotters and cargo cult science. :-)
For what is is worth, vitamin D and eating more veggies also greatly improved my own joint pain, so there is another anecdote you can dismiss. But that helps explains why I'm more willing to believe such studies -- I tried them and they worked for me. However, such advice also makes evolutionary sense, assuming humans are adapted to a life in the sun eating mostly a variety of vegetables (and maybe a bit of "free range organic" animal products like termites and fish of the purer sort available 100,000 years ago but rare now, as even Gorillas eat termites). In general, eating that way reduces the risk of being "suddenly dead" from strokes and heart attacks. Hopefully after reviewing the three references, and then looking at the many more he cites elsewhere, you might revise your opinion eventually? But even if not, good luck in finding what works for you to bring you abundant good health.
Maybe that is not the best study in the world, but you seem to me to be ignoring the context here. I was originally responding to a comment that included stuff on asthma, allergies, and fibromyalgia. The page I am citing and the references covers many allergies, and fibromyalgia in that context (fibromyalgia in practice perhaps often being a catch-all phrase for joint pain which can have multiple causes). Also, you are just out of hand dismissing an MD's report on his own decades of clinical experience. And that experience is also reflected by reports by others, if you look around. It is just not extremely profitable or easy advice to give in this society, compared to pill pushing and surgery selling.
By the way:
"The relation between vitamin D deficiency and fibromyalgia syndrome in women"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21894355
And:
"5 Ways To Control Fibromyalgia With Diet: New research shows that picking these foods may ease pain"
http://www.prevention.com/node/27278
http://www.prevention.com/health/health-concerns/5-ways-control-fibromyalgia-diet/5-veg-out
"Some researchers speculate that oxidative stress may be a cause of fibro symptoms. Oxidative stress occurs when the body doesnâ(TM)t produce enough antioxidants to battle cell-damaging free radicals in the body. Most fruits and veggies are packed with important antioxidants, like vitamins A, C, and E, which fight free radicals to keep your body normalized. Certain studies also show a raw, vegan diet can improve symptoms, but thatâ(TM)s difficult for most people to follow. If you do choose to eat meat, though, opt for a small portion of grass-fed beef. "It is an excellent source of iron and vitamin B12, both nutrients which are extremely important in keeping your pain-processing nervous system healthy," says Holton."
Of course, they don't cite their studies; some other studies are mentioned here:
http://www.beyondveg.com/cat/links-out/raw-research.shtml
So, be skeptical of new information. But how about being skeptical about old information, too? And maybe going a bit further and looking around for yourself at a new idea (or an old one that was forgotten or driven out socially)? It's not very scientific to just dismiss all new ideas for lack of enough evidence (for example, what kept us from LENR (Cold Fusion) for two decades because some hot fusion scientists at MIT could not replicate an experiment in a week or two where success would have jeopardized their own livelihood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Pathological_skepticism
http://pesn.com/2011/12/27/9601994_History_of_MITs_Blatant_Suppression_of_Cold_Fusion/
The scientific enterprise in our society is so messed up in so many ways, as reflected in the quotes I collected here; one example:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased searc
...both of the library variety and the hands-on variety in his practice. He cites thousands of reference sin his book "Eat to Live" and has had thousands of patients over his career.
Researchers at Harvard University have seconded the vitamin D deficiency hypotheses as a potential cause of autism.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2009/new-harvard-paper-on-autism/
Yet your post got modded +5 insightful. Still so much mis-info on slashdot about health... But I still feel it is slowly improving. And you are reasonable to be skeptical.
You might like this article critical of Dr. Hyman:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/09/08/dr-mark-hyman-mangles-autism-science-on/
None-the-less, if you truly are a hard-working skeptic and not just a lazy skeptic-of-just-new-ideas, the entire scientific enterprise has failed in several big ways in relation to medicine, as I quote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
So, it is hard to move beyond that. Look at what happened to the guy who suggested doctors wash their hands after dissecting corpses before they then deliver babies: ... ... He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, possibly caused by the beating. ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
".. As a result, his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other more subtle factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.[7]:9[Note 6]
Specifically, Semmelweis's claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later, when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others.
During 1848, Semmelweis widened the scope of his washing protocol, to include all instruments coming in contact with patients in labour, and used mortality rates time series to document his success in virtually eliminating puerperal fever from the hospital ward.
In 1865 JÃnos Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution.
Cold fusion has gotten the cold shoulder too for twenty years...
http://pesn.com/2012/09/06/9602177_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_September6/
Who are the real charlatans of medicine?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who
There are twelve references cited on that page. There are thousands more cited in Dr. Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live". Why do people (myself included in the past) have such a hard time accepting there is any connection between what they eat and their health? If you fed a monkey only sugar water for years and it went crazy and its fur started falling out, would you say the way to bring it back to health is to give it prescription drugs along with the sugar water?
Evan vegan diets can be messed up with too much refined sugar and refined starch, btw:
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Dr. Fuhrman: Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity.
The second serious error of the vegan community is the heavy use of fake meat and cheese analogues usually made from soy and almost always high in salt. Besides the lack of nutrients and high levels of acrylamides in these highly processed foods, with continuation of the high salt diet hemorrhagic strokes are even more likely in a vegan than in a person on a heart-disease promoting diet rich in animal products. Consuming salted foods should not be taken lightly; it is a killer.
The third error common in the vegan community is the lack of concern for individual differences which may heighten nutritional requirements in some individuals, especially the elderly, which make it advisable to supplement when appropriate with Vitamin D, B12, Taurine, DHA, or iodine, for example, to assure that no one develops a medical condition as a result of sub-optimal nutritional intake. To better assure nutritional completeness I recommend to my patients my vegan multi Gentle Care Formula and my vegan DHA Purity, and then if not getting regular sunshine to also add a Vitamin D supplement. Many vegans think supplementing with B12 is enough to guarantee nutritional excellence for most people. Long-term nutritional deficiencies are not harmless. Omnivores develop deficiencies, too, and blood tests can be used to ascertain if deficiencies exist."
Eating meat poses at least six big problems:
* the environmental impact & resource usage
* e-coli from manure runoff contaminating vegetables
* the cruelty of factory farming
* meat has few plant-based phytonutrients your body needs to work well and resists cancer (though it can have some essential nutrients like omega-3s if it is a high quality meat, which is rare these days).
* animals typically eaten in the USA are fed non-organic grain with various pesticides on it and other toxins, the animals then concentrate those toxins in their fat which they eat 10X grain to make per calorie, so when you eat typical US meat product, you are getting potentially up to 100X the exposure to pesticides than a vegan eating organic veggies.
* When you cook meat, you usually produce cancer causing acrylamides.
So, with standard meat, you both get more exposure to cancer-causing compounds and you get less phytonutrients to fight cancer. Plus you undermine our collective future environmentally and morally. So, in the long term, that all undermines your health. None-the-less, Fuhrman is not a total extremist on such things -- he says as long as 90% of you calories are from what he recommends, you will get most of the benefits.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
Our tax dollars at work. :-( And then a lot of the rest of our tax dollars go pay to deal with the medical consequences... And then even more tax dollars go to pay for the cultural and psychological consequences (including aggressiveness and poor thinking) that also flow from poor nutrition:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime
"Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat; Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
If you had looked at that web page, you woudl have seen a list of references at the end:
[i] Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, et al. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol 2002 Dec;138(12):1584-90
[ii] Kaartinen K, Lammi K, Hypen M, et al. Vegan diet alleviates fibromyalgia symptoms. Scand J Rheumatol 2000;29(5):308-13. Donaldson MS; Speight N; Loomis Fibromyalgia syndrome improved using a mostly raw vegetarian diet: an observational study. BMC Complement Altern Med 2001;1(1):7. Hanninen, Kaartinen K, Rauma AL, et al. Antioxidants in vegan diet and rheumatic disorders. Toxicology 2000 Nov 30;155(1-3):45-53.
[iii]Shaheen SO, Sterne JA, Thompson RL, et al. Dietary antioxidants and asthma in adults: population-based case-control study. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2001;164(10 Pt 1):1823-8.
[iv] Huang SL, Lin KC, Pan WH. Dietary factors associated with physician-diagnosed asthma and allergic rhinitis in teenagers: analyses of the first Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan. Clin Exp Allergy 2001 Feb;31(2):259-64.
[v]Seaton A, Devereux G. Diet, infection and wheezy illness: lessons from adults. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2000;11 Suppl 13:37-40.
[vi] Oddy WH; de Klerk NH; Kendall GE et al. Ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids and childhood asthma. J Asthma 2004;41(3):319-26.
[vii] Huang SL, Pan WH. Dietary fats and asthma in teenagers: analyses of the first Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan (NAHSIT). Clin Exp Allergy 2001 Dec;31(12):1875-80.
[viii] Farchi S, Forastiere F, Agabiti N, et al. Dietary factors associated with wheezing and allergic rhinitis in children. Eur Respir J 2003 Nov;22(5):772-80.
[ix] Scott D, Symmons DP, Coulton BL, Popert AJ. Long-term outcome of treating rheumatoid arthritis: results after 20 years. Lancet 1987;1(8542):1108-1111.
[x] Jones M, Symmons, Finn J, Wolfe F. Does exposure to immunosuppressive therapy increase the 10 year malignancy and mortality risk? British Journal of Rheumatology 1996; 35(8):738-745.
[xi]Fuhrman J, Sarter, B, Calabro DJ. Case Studies of Medically Supervised Water-only Fasting Resulting in Remission of Autoimmune Disease. Alternative Therapies 2001;8(4):1-3.
[xii] Kjeldsen-Kragh J, Hvatum M, Haugen M, Forre O, Scott H. Antibodies against dietary antigens in rheumatoid arthritis patents treated with fasting and a one-year vegetarian diet. Clin Exp Rheumatol 1995;13(2):167-172.
Maybe you are the one just quacking the party line?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words#Duckspeak
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
BTW, eating more veggies can help with the some of the disease you mentioned:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"Fibromyalgia is a disease highlighted by discomfort, pain and tenderness all over the body. The cause is unknown. Typical treatments involve pain medication and anti-depressants used to aid sleep. Better sleep has been shown to be of benefit.
I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. Acrylamides are toxic substances produced by baking and frying carbohydrates. The diet-style I recommend for fibromylagia patients is rich in natural plant foods especially organic berries and green vegetables and restricted in animal products and baked grains. Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are encouraged. Fibromyalgia patients routinely get well, and they get well quickly.
Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] Though the researchers do not seem to have the experience and understanding of why what they are doing works, the effects are dramatic.
Similar to the nutritional treatment of most diseases, it is not one photochemical compound or the removal of one toxic habit that works; it is the symphonic combination of removing multiple nutritional stresses along with the addition of multiple beneficial nutritional compounds that results in consistent and sustained results. The high intake of polyphenolic compounds such as quercetin, myricetin and kaempherol, and the high intake of lignans and bioflavonoids are just a few of the hundreds of nutrients with unpronounceable names that can only be obtained in large amounts from a diet rich in natural plant foods."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
It sounds from those two sources like many cases of autism could be prevented by higher vitamin D levels of pregnant women and better diet, but in the first few years of life after birth, some aspects of autism can be reversed with vitamin D supplements and good diet. How far and for how many kids is still an open question.
Also of general interest on eating healthier:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/food-industry_b_1559920.html
https://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
"And you only need five minutes of sun light to completely restore vitamin D levels in the body. kids stand outside waiting on the bus longer than that."
I know that is what we have all been taught in school in past years. The problem is it is not true. Following that advice will lead to severe health problems. Here are better recommendations:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
The following is closer to the truth, based roughly on what Dr. John Cannell writes on his website:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/john-cannell/
For a light skinned adult human in a (skimpy) bathing suit under peak noon-day sun, that person will produce about 20,000 IU vitamin D (about 30X the US RDA) in about twenty minutes. For someone with dark skin, that will take two to four hours in a bathing suit. Any excess vitamin D beyond that will be broken down into other compounds that we don't yet fully understand the significance of (but may have health value). Meanwhile, the body slowly charges its fat soluble stores of vitamin D. But you may need to do that for months to saturate the body to the point where it will have a six to nine months supply (maybe longer or shorter) where you could go the winter without supplements.
For about half the year in more Northern latitudes, your body will not make any vitamin D at any time of day because the angle of the sun through the atmosphere means too much UV-B is absorbed for it to have much affect on your skin. Similarly, outside of peak sun hours, there is much less vitamin D produced.
So, while I was taught the same thing you said growing up, that even in winter your face or hands would produce enough vitamin D to get by, it just is not true. And that has serious implications. For example:
"Blacks more likely to die from cancer because of vitamin D deficiency, study finally admits"
http://www.naturalnews.com/036181_blacks_vitamin_D_deficiency_cancer.html
And also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/introduction/
And on top of that, dermatologists and those who would sell cosmetics and sun screens scare people about sun exposure without telling them to supplement with vitamin D if they avoid the sun. And even if they told them to supplement, the US RDA is about ten times too low for adults (and in any case, you need a blood test to be sure of levels as different people respond differently to supplements). For children the RDA is also fairly low. For infants the RDA is OK. Basically, the RDA is almost the same for all these ages, but since vitamin D needs correspond somewhat to weight, that is why the child and adult levels are too low.
Conflict-of-interest is one reason the US government RDAs and other nutritional recommendations are often (but not always) so wrong, as discussed here with the USDA's recent absurd recommendations to eat meat every day:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/news-usda-dont-go-meatless-not-even-one-day-a-week.html
So that is why keeping kids indoor more will destroy their health (unless they take supplemental vitamin D, and even then, we don't fully understand all the supplementation issues). Many schools have already removed recess outdoors in order to have more time for in-chair paper-pushing academic work, and yet ironically the lack of exercise and sunlight may have decreased test scores as it decreases a child's general physical and mental health.
"Schools are not going anywhere. The need for social interaction while learning is common to all peop
Please look at the link you supplied:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Toxicity
"For infants (birth to 12 months), the tolerable upper limit (maximum amount that can be tolerated without harm) is set at 25 micrograms/day (1000 IU). One thousand micrograms (40,000 IU) per day in infants has produced toxicity within one month.[80]"
So, after some body gave an infant 100X the RDA every day for a month, the infant showed signs of toxicity. I'd venture the signs of toxicity probably went away when they stopped supplementing (given the examples I cites about East German infants getting massive doses and going on to win the Olympics). If an infant 100X the RDA for iron, in one day they might be dead? Based on that comparison, vitamin D is a very safe supplement for children. The health consequences of getting one tenth the RDA are far greater than getting 10X the RDA. Error here is much better on the side of abundance.
Still, for infants, I'd agree the US RDA is more or less correct, and there is probably no reason to ever give an amount about the RDA. Based on what I've cited from Dr. John Cannell's writings, the fears of what happens near that limit are overblown. And the "official" recommendations remain way too low for adults, as it is not much more than infants, and your comparisons while plausible sounding don't match the science, because vitamin D is used in every cell for signaling more than for "growth". (Even ignoring the RDAs are just probably wrong for lots of things -- his chatter on RDAs is all too true:
http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=329928 )
The bottom line is that humans are adapted to a life outdoors in the sun. That includes pregnant women getting enough sun. We deviate from that norm at the risk of our own health, and it is only in the past few decades that so many of us have become indoor creatures, with health consequences probably including autism. Some culture clashes even make that worse, like devout Somali Muslim women moving from near the equator where they lived in houses with open courtyards to northern latitudes around Minneapolis where they stay indoors all the times and wear a Burka otherwise, and then people wonder why so many of their children are autistic (as they do not know yet to supplement with 6000 IU D3 daily when pregnant and nursing):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism
"What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism? A few researchers are turning their attention to the sunshine vitamin as a culprit, prompted by the experience of immigrants that have moved from their equatorial country to two northern latitude locations"
P.S. I did not call you an "idiot" that I could see. But on this one issue, you are certainly echoing the conventional wisdom that has caused so much suffering over the past few decades (including bad advice we got from our own pediatrician). Good luck in finding the right amount of vitamin D3 that works for you and your family.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."
Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Pushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/
If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."