What's added takes away

We barely know about the effects of chemical food additives, and our governments don't care

Eric Schlosser
Thursday September 6, 2007
The Guardian

The overwhelming majority of our additive intake today has been part of the diet of humans for generations: yeast, salt, sugar, baking powder. But thousands of other additives, derived from both natural and synthetic sources, have recently become commonplace in western eating. What are these substances doing to our bodies and our minds? We are just beginning to find out.

A study published today by Southampton University, into the impact of additives on groups of three-year-olds and eight-year-olds, produced some alarming results. The Food Standards Agency-commissioned report found a link between hyperactivity among children and certain food colourings, as well as a preservative used in sweets, drinks and processed foods in the UK.

We are only just beginning to learn the impact of synthetic additions to what we eat. The industrialisation of the food supply has turned consumers into the unwitting subjects of a vast, ongoing scientific experiment.

Spices and preservatives have been added to foods for millennia in order to make them last longer and taste better. And there is a long history of using additives to mislead consumers, with various chemicals employed to supply taste, enhance colour and disguise the aroma of spoiled meats. Before the advent of federal food safety laws in the United States, dangerous heavy metals were routinely used as colouring agents in children's sweets.

It would be hard to find a processed food on a supermarket shelf (or on a fast food menu) that does not contain a vast array of chemical additives. Indeed, the packaged food industry and the fast food industry are dependent on the use of such additives to prevent spoilage, to allow the transport of products long distances, and to maintain uniformity. Any finding that such additives pose a threat to human health will threaten the financial health of these industries. And that is why so few large-scale studies have been conducted. The absence of adequate information greatly benefits the producers of industrial food.

In the United States there is an extremely cosy relationship between the food industry and the government agencies that are ostensibly regulating it. Until a few years ago, the head of the food and drug administration - our version of the Food Standards Agency, responsible for the safety of most of the food that Americans eat - was a former executive vice president of the national food processors association. Similarly close ties between industry and government can be found in the European Union. As a result, hundreds of food additives are never tested for harmful effects. And the risks posed by consuming a variety of additives in combination are rarely explored.

I don't think that people should feel panicky about food additives or succumb to the latest food scare. The best advice is probably caveat emptor. We simply don't know what effect these things are having on us. And government food safety agencies don't seem eager to find out. "Food additives play a vital role in today's bountiful and nutritious food supply," the US food and drug administration claimed in a brochure some years ago. "They make possible an array of convenience foods without the inconvenience of daily shopping."

Perhaps a little less convenience, and a lot more unprocessed food, would be the wise course.

· Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal Is Doing to the World, and Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food
comment@guardian.co.uk


Weight loss without dieting

Vitamin D something of a panacea

SHERYL UBELACKER

Canadian Press

September 10, 2007 at 10:20 PM EDT

TORONTO — People who take vitamin D supplements appear to have a lower risk of death from any cause, an analysis of numerous studies has found, adding to the weight of evidence suggesting that the “sunshine nutrient” confers widespread health benefits.

In an analysis of data pooled from 18 randomized controlled trials, researchers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the European Institute of Oncology found that subjects who took at least 500 international units of vitamin D daily had a 7 per cent lower risk of death, on average, compared with control groups given a dummy pill.

The 18 clinical trials involved a total of more than 57,000 subjects, who were followed for almost six years. Most of the studies, with participants mainly over age 65, were investigating the role of vitamin D in keeping bones strong and preventing fractures.

In the nine trials that collected blood samples, participants who took supplements had an average 1.4- to 5.2-fold higher blood level of vitamin D than those who did not, the analysis shows.

Previous studies have suggested that vitamin D deficiency may be linked to a higher risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and diabetes — illnesses that account for 60 per cent to 70 per cent of deaths in high-income countries, the authors say.

“If the associations made between vitamin D and these conditions were consistent, then interventions effectively strengthening vitamin D status should result in reduced total mortality,” the authors write.

Researchers can't say for sure what it is about vitamin D that seems to improve health and apparently prolong life.

“It's still a little bit obscure,” co-author Dr. Philippe Autier, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Agency for Research on Cancer, said Monday from Lyon, France. “There's one area of research quite recently that showed that vitamin D had the possibility to delay, to retard, the progression of certain diseases, essentially cancer and some cardiovascular diseases.”

Numerous laboratory studies have shown that vitamin D can halt the growth of cells, Dr. Autier said. “Cancer is characterized by the proliferation of cells. It looks like the vitamin D was able to . . . put a control on this, put the brake on this proliferation.”

“So that's why probably vitamin D could be able to decrease the progression of the disease and explain better survival and greater life expectancy.”

In June, the Canadian Cancer Society recommended that adults consider taking a vitamin D supplement of 1,000 IUs daily during fall and winter, while darker-skinned and older people should think about maintaining that daily intake year-round.

Dr. Reinhold Vieth, an expert in vitamin D and osteoporosis at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, called the analysis “really interesting.” By pooling results from many studies, the European researchers were able to tease out vitamin D's effect on longevity that wouldn't have been statistically relevant in a single study.

“So what it's coming along at is more and more little pieces of evidence that say it's very interesting to look at vitamin D a little bit more,” said Dr. Vieth, who was not involved in the research published Tuesday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Two other recently published papers have shown vitamin D's apparent benefits: In one, young Finnish men who took the nutrient had half the number of respiratory infections compared with those not taking a supplement.

And in a study of older people in the Netherlands, who were followed for eight years, researchers found that those with high vitamin D levels in their blood were less likely to end up in a nursing home and less likely to die early compared to those with low blood levels of vitamin D.

“What we've been finding out over the last 10 years is that vitamin D is not a one-trick pony that just relates to bone (health), but to many biological functions that go on throughout the body and make use of vitamin D to regulate the way they work,” dr. Vieth said.

“So it covers a lot of territory.”

In an editorial accompanying the study, Dr. Edward Giovannucci of the Harvard School of Public Health says the meta-analysis “adds a new chapter in the accumulating evidence for a beneficial role of vitamin D on health.”

“Research on vitamin D should be continued to clearly elucidate the specific benefits and optimal intakes and levels of vitamin D,” Dr. Giovannucci writes. “Nonetheless, based on the total body of evidence of health conditions associated with vitamin D deficiency, abetted with the results from this meta-analysis, a more proactive attitude to identify, prevent and treat vitamin D deficiency should be part of standard medical care.”

“From a broader public health perspective, the roles of moderate sun exposure, food fortification with vitamin D and higher-dose vitamin D supplements for adults need to be debated.”



Weight loss without dieting

Vitamin C's Cancer-Fighting Properties

By Will Dunham
9-11-7

(Reuters) -- Vitamin C can impede the growth of some types of tumors although not in the way some scientists had suspected, researchers reported on Monday.

The new research, published in the journal Cancer Cell, supported the general notion that vitamin C and other so-called antioxidants can slow tumor growth, but pointed to a mechanism different from the one many experts had suspected.

The researchers generated encouraging results when giving vitamin C to mice that had been implanted with human cancer cells -- either the blood cancer lymphoma or prostate cancer. Another antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine, also limited tumor growth in the mice, the researchers said.

Antioxidants are nutrients that prevent some of the damage from unstable molecules known as free radicals, created when the body turns food into energy. Vitamin C, vitamin E and beta-carotene are among well-known antioxidants.

Previous research had suggested that vitamin C may stifle tumor growth by preventing DNA damage from free radicals.

But researchers led by Dr. Chi Dang, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found that antioxidants appear to be working in a different way -- undermining a tumor's ability to grow under certain conditions.

Figuring out how antioxidants impede tumors should help scientists figure out how they might be harnessed to fight cancer, Dang said. In addition to the cancer types involved in this study, others that might be vulnerable to vitamin C include colon cancer and cervical cancer, he said.

Dang said more research is needed and cautioned against taking high doses of vitamin C based on these findings.

"Certainly we would very much discourage people with untreated cancer to go out and take buckets full of vitamin C," Dang said in a telephone interview.

Linus Pauling argued in the 1970s that vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, could ward off cancer, but the notion has proved contentious.

Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry as well as the Nobel Peace Prize, died in 1994.

"Pauling actually had some good evidence that under certain situations vitamin C can prevent tumor formation. It's just the mechanism was really not that clear then," Dang said.

"Now that, I think, we provide relatively compelling evidence of how this works, maybe Pauling is partly right. We shouldn't dismiss him so quickly." Dang added.

Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Critical Response To Vitamin C's Cancer-Fighting Properties
By Ken Adachi
9-15-7


Dear Jeff,
Re: http://www.rense.com/general78/csprop.htm
How utterly vexing and annoying it was to read the salubrious, yet untrue assertions made by oncologist and John Hopkins professor Dr. Chi Dang concerning the role that Dr Linus Pauling played in the 1970s in regard to heralding the importance of Vitamin C as a CRITICAL ingredient in immune system modulation (enhancement) to not only PREVENT the formation of cancerous tumors, but to ALSO mitigate and reduce the advancement of cancer growth, once it had reached the full blown metastasis stage.
Dr Dang, an obvious servant of the chemical cancer industry, reduces the Herculean contributions in vitamin C knowledge provided by Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling down to that of a minor, peon researcher whose discoveries merit no more mention than that of a footnote.
I'd like to punch that guy square in the nose for uttering such vapid stupidities!
Long before this man showed up in a national press release, Linus Pauling had ALREADY PROVEN and DEMONSTRATED THE many pathways by which Vitamin C enhances immunity, and not only for cancer, but for ANY disease condition.
Pauling went FAR BEYOND tests with mice. He had already graduated though ALL the ranks of animal research and was long ago engaged in LONG TERM human studies (with Dr Cameron of Canada) in the EARLY 1970S! He had published all of his research findings in numerous peer reviewed journals and published no less than SEVEN Books documenting his findings!
This is NOT the first time that I have encountered institutional hacks from big name "medical research" universities or institutions that have attempted to lay claim to discoveries that had ALREADY been documented and published by earlier pioneers. About 6 years ago, I caught a brief news item under new science discoveries in which a claim was made by a female university "team leader" from a Big Deal university in San Diego where she said that SHE had discovered some NEW and remarkable attributes of Flax seed oil to stem cancer proliferation. I wrote her and her adoring university promoters, that she hadn't discovered ANYTHING; that her "work" was a virtual carbon copy of Dr Johanna Budwig's research about flax seed oil made in the 1950s in Germany for which she had to endure endless assaults and debunking travails from the entrenched food oil industry in Germany.
If you want to find out what Vitamin C can do to improve health and immunity, then obtain the books of Dr Linus Pauling, published in the 1970's and 1980s, and you will find out what this man will undoubtedly lay claim to as "discovering" in the coming months and years.
Long live the Corporate Foundation Research Grant and the hacks who covet them, for they make life worth living for no other reason than to rebuke their calumny and pretense to fame!
Sincerely,

Ken Adachi



Weight loss without dieting