Every now and again I report on what seems like a total, mindless waste of money. Like this study. 13 years and 15,000 people interviewed and tracked, at  Gawd knows what cost. And the results?

A pot belly makes you more likely to have a heart attack and die a sudden death! What a breakthrough eh?

Still, if you haven’t got the message, it’s jolly well time you did. Belly fat kills!

A large waist-to-hip ratio matters even more than body-mass index (BMI). In fact with BMI, top athlete Michael Jordan is technically obese! So BMI means little. But shape does. If your guts are fatter than your hips, you are at serious risk.

You are more likely to get heart disease, hypertensions, stroke etc. You need to take off that excess circle of fat round the middle. Fat in the abdomen spews inflammatory substances. Inflammation is linked with heart problems, aging and an early death.

Sudden death is not nice. Sudden death is defined as death within one hour of initial symptoms. There is no warning, no time to say goodbye. No time to get on that diet and fitness program you always promised yourself. Boom, 60 minutes (or less) and you are out of here.

Need I say more?

[Heart Rhythm Society, annual meeting, May 9, 2012, Boston]

Yet again, the counter-intuitive idea that coffee is good for you is given a boost!

It’s known that coffee drinkers are less likely to get dementia, stroke, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. Several studies have shown that.

Now a new and pretty large study has shown that coffee drinkers are 10- 15% less likely to die from all causes. That’s big!

However—a warning. These were adjusted figures, meaning other factors were written out. In truth coffee drinkers are more likely to smoke and therefore, truly, coffee drinkers didn’t do so well when all factors were taken into account. But it’s because of the smoking, not the coffee.

In any case, nobody has proved that coffee is beneficial. Only that coffee drinkers are different in some way. It may not be the coffee but something else they do, like work out more in the gym.

It reminds me of a food allergy patient of mine back in the 1980s. He got migraines every time he drank whisky. Case closed? No! It was the peanuts he ate along with the whisky!!

Over the years 1995 – 2008, the researchers looked at 33,731 men and 18,784 women who died. That’s a pretty big study.

It showed a dose-dependent (the more coffee, the bigger the effect) inverse association between coffee drinking and total mortality.

More specifically, they found that men who consumed 6 or more cups of coffee each day were 10% less likely to die during the study period than were men who did not drink coffee. For women, the reduction in risk was even greater, at 15%.

As for cause-specific mortality, this effect held good deaths resulting from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, respiratory disease, infections, injuries, and accidents, but NOT deaths from cancer.

The researchers themselves pointed out the biggest weakness with the study, which was that coffee consumption was assessed at only a single point in time (upon entry into the study), so it is possible that consumption patterns might have changed over time.

There was also no study of how the coffee was served. So if you want an extra tip from an old warhorse (me), I’ll tell you that latte and cappuccino are not good choices. It’s back to the milk thing. But also fat and calories.

Lattes and cappuccino are just schlock. The benefits of coffee have mostly been seen in Europe, where espresso is the norm and black is usual. And taken without sugar. If you want sweetness, why drink coffee? It’s bitter, for heaven’s sake. That’s why true coffee lovers like it!

So be warned about the cream; never add sucralose. Otherwise, caffeine may be the way to go! (Providing you are not allergic to it).

[REFERENCE: N Engl J Med. 2012;366:1891-1904. Abstract]

Those who are new to this list may not follow my joke: I Told ‘Em! is one of those stories where I was saying it over 30 years ago and is has just recently been “discovered”! Often I was scolded or derided at the time–and then science came around to prove that what I was saying is true–and was true, all along.

This time we are back to how bad milk is for us humans: yes, even raw milk, which many folks can’t get their head round. They just LOVE the raw milk propaganda and cannot be swayed by mere facts.

In this instance, I have pointed out in just about every book I wrote since 1985 that milk causes osteoporosis. It’s simple, if you ask the right questions: US women have the highest intake of dairy produce in the world; they also have the highest rate of hip fractures (more women die of fracture of the neck of femur than die of breast cancer!) Chinese women do not drink milk and the disease osteoporosis is virtually unknown.

The sad truth is that milk actually causes malabsorption. It LOWERS calcium levels and leads to osteoporosis.

Forget the calcium myth: as I’ve joked for 40 years, if that worked then you could cure iron-deficiency anemia by having people just lick screws and nails!

Calcium in your mouth does NOT equal calcium in the blood. It just isn’t bioavailable.

Milk is so toxic to humans (I’m talking about cow’s; not goat’s or breast milk) that it corrupts the gut lining.

Milk is NOT nourishing, milk is anti-nutritional. It’s all a myth, perpetuated by government bodies, out to protect the farmers’ profits by killing you.

Milk is filth! Don’t drink it. Especially never—ever—give it to a child. Children do NOT need cow’s milk to develop strong teeth and bones. They need to AVOID cow’s milk, to develop strong teeth and bones!

REFERENCES: “Consumption of dairy products, particularly at age 20 years, was associated with an increased risk of hip fracture in old age.” (“Case-Control Study of Risk Factors for Hip Fractures in the Elderly”. American Journal of Epidemiology. Vol. 139, No. 5, 1994).

“These data do not support the hypothesis that higher consumption of milk or other food sources of calcium by adult women protects against hip or forearm fractures.” (Feskanich D, Willett WC, Stampfer MJ, Colditz GA. Milk, dietary calcium, and bone fractures in women: a 12-year prospective study. American Journal of Public Health. 1997).

Anyway, go here and download my booklet on Osteoporosis, if you don’t already have it. It’s FREE; so why not?

http://www.informed-wellness.com/osteoporosis2.pdf

(right-click and choose “Save as…” or “Save target as…” etc.)

In the UK it’s pussy, in Spain conejo (rabbit) and in the USA beaver (apologies if you didn’t know all that and you are embarrassed—but on my websites we don’t do coy). All references to a woman’s exterior genitalia seem to suggest a small furry animal.

The vulva-vagina is the prize for many a man’s dream (and I suppose, these days, one has to say for those who bat for the other team too).

Vaginal health is little talked about; probably less than vaginal disease even.

A new study called my attention to an interesting fact. Apparently vaginal flora can change quite significantly over time. This is issue is almost as important as intestinal flora and the subject of dysbiosis.

As with the gut, the vagina is technically “outside” the body and therefore accessible to bacteria in the environment. That’s apart from not-quite-clean fingers and penises. The body has various defences for this, to prevent unnecessary infections. For example malic acid is a natural substance found in the vagina and intended to deter pathogens.

But there is no question that the number one deterrent to pathogenic microbes is nice, friendly microbes that got there first! Just like the gut.

But apparently, this population of vaginal microbes can change quite dramatically, in quite short order—not just in response to medications either.

That’s according to a study published in the May 2, 2012, issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Hitherto, all women have been considered pretty much the same when it comes to vaginal microbiota, with the same treatment, usually antibiotics.

Sometimes antibiotics work. But often not. That’s not surprising, since the natural flora are killed just as quickly as pathogens.

This time you can’t use probiotics or yoghurt, though some women I know have douched with yoghurt (one case had strawberry seeds embedded in her cervix—she’d used flavored yoghurt!) Don’t try this at home!

In this study, researchers found five basic bacterial communities, and also noted that some changed rapidly in the same woman while others stayed stable.

In some cases, the collection of bacteria seen in a particular woman would have suggested bacterial vaginitis, although these women were healthy and not experiencing any symptoms.

Changes in bacterial communities tended to correspond with estrogen levels at different points in the menstrual cycle, the particular composition of bacteria in a woman’s vagina and sexual activity.

Vaginal bacteria also can affect pregnancy and fertility. The composition of vaginal microbiota and of a man’s sperm could mean that a woman is fertile with one man and infertile with another, an accompanying editorial suggested.

“We need to rethink the way we approach women’s health and treatment and diagnosis,” said the study authors.

[SOURCE: May 2, 2012, Science Translational Medicine]

Student fights flesh-eating bacteria after zip line fall

[Updated at 3:57 p.m. ET] A University of West Georgia graduate psychology student is fighting for her life with flesh-eating bacteria after falling off a homemade zip line and cutting her leg, CNN affiliates WSB report and WXIA report.

Aimee Copeland, 24, fell off a homemade zip line near a friend’s home in Carroll County, Georgia, on May 1. Doctors at a hospital in Augusta were forced to amputate most of her right leg on Friday after the bacteria destroyed her leg muscles and moved into other parts of her body. She stopped breathing and one point and had to be resuscitated, her father, Andy Copeland, told WSB.

On Thursday, Andy Copeland told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her hands and her remaining foot also will have to be amputated.

But he said she was showing improvement at a hospital in Augusta and was “extremely responsive, coherent and alert” on Thursday, the AJC reported.

Aimee Copeland contracted Aeromonas hydrophila (not MRSA) in the deep gash in her leg after the zip line broke.

I’m sure people think I’m exaggerating when I announce the end of the Golden Age Of Antibiotics. But stories like this illustrate just how precarious our relationship with bacteria really is.

It makes it VITAL, as I keep saying, that everyone get educated NOW about antibiotic alternatives. Googling for options when disaster strikes is TOO LATE. Get wise. Read up on the topic: you need my expert review “How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics”. I bet Aimee’s Mum and Dad wish they had read it, long ago. Go here to read about it:

MRSA Hotline

Surprise, surprise: a scientific study of scientific studies finds that most are crap! But what if the study that found that most studies are shabby is also shabby and unreliable? (just kidding…)

Thing is, we already knew this, didn’t we? I’ve ben saying for nearly forty years that so-called clinical trials are just marketing in disguise.

Still, it’s nice to find the industry is trying to do some of its own dirty washing.

What got me going? A new analysis of registered clinical trials finds that many are small and of poor quality.

Studies of cancer treatments, in particular, often fail to follow the highest standards of medical research, the analysis found, and a full 7% of studies didn’t even bother to mention what their purpose was (required by law), while others failed to provide many important details.

“We can see that we can do better,” said report author Dr. Robert Califf, in something of an understatement!

In the past, there would be a lot of studies done, but many would never be studied or reported anywhere. Sometimes you’d only see the ones that were positive. Now, the law has been strengthened and all trials are required, by law, here in the USA, to be registered. So trials can’t be swept under the carpet when they don’t go the way the drug company wants it.

That means things are cleaner and more honest, right?

Not a bit of it. All it means is that drug companies hire ghost writers to dress up lousy results and make them look positive (by the simple expedient of lying and falsifying).

The new report says 62 percent of the trials from 2007-2010 were small, with 100 or fewer participants. Only 4 percent had more than 1,000 participants.

Ideally, medical studies compare randomly chosen groups of people to each other, with one group getting a treatment and the other getting another treatment or an inactive placebo. However, 65 percent of cancer studies didn’t randomize their participants, compared to 26 percent of cardiovascular studies.

One expert agreed that the quality of medical research in the United States is lacking.

That’s odd because what happens here is that doctors won’t believe anything that was tested scientifically overseas. The attitude is: if we didn’t discover it ourselves, then it’s bunk.

The big problem with crummy studies is that the medical world relies on research not only to determine whether new medications work but also to figure out guidelines for common medical procedures, like colonoscopies.

The report appears in the May 2, 2012, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

200 blondes, according to the joke. While the blonde bimbo remains a cultural icon, many women subscribe to the idea that blondes have more fun and go so far as to bleach their hair.

But what about true blondes? Flaxen hair is a genetic thing, of course. But apparently, not all “blonde genes” are the same. It depends where you are born.

The genetic variant that causes many dark-skinned people from the Solomon Islands to have blonde hair is different from the gene possessed by blonde Europeans, the study found. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine found that this particular variant is absent in the genomes of Europeans.

This proved a bit surprising, because most studies in human genetics only include participants of European descent. That’s pretty lame, scientifically, but we’ll let it pass.

The frequency of blonde hair in the Solomon Islands is between 5 percent and 10 percent (those sailors, they get everywhere!)

Actually, it may not be visiting Europeans impregnating the women. Many locals have assumed their blonde hair was the result of sun exposure or high fish consumption. The study authors, however, sought to determine if there was a unique genetic basis for this characteristic.

To settle the matter, researchers looked for the genes associated with blonde hair, then selected 43 of the most blonde and 42 of the darkest-haired Islanders from the samples collected, and looked for differences in the frequency of genetic variants between the two groups.

The authors noted that the genetic variant that leads to blonde hair among people in the Solomon Islands is not found in the genomes of Europeans.

“Within a week we had our initial result,” the study’s co-first author, Eimear Kenny, said in the news release. “It was such a striking signal pointing to a single gene — a result you could hang your hat on. That rarely happens in science. It was one of the best experiences of my career.”

“The human characteristic of blonde hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania,” she said. “That’s quite unexpected and fascinating.”

So, it wasn’t the sailors, after all!

French composer Claude Debussy liked blondes. He wrote an evocative piece called The Girl With The Flaxen Hair (La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin). You may know it; if not go here and listen on YouTube, played by Joshua Bell. Now there’s a guy with a violin IQ of 200!

[SOURCE: Stanford University School of Medicine, news release, May 3, 2012]

Recent research has shed light on the crucial “conversation” between gut microbes and infant genes that appear to help the breast-fed infant make a safe transition from life in the womb to life outside. The study was published April 29, 2012, in the open-access journal Genome Biology reports.

This confirms earlier findings that show breast-feeding gooses the developing immune system. It elucidated the chemical chatter between genes in the developing infants and their gut bacteria by comparing the bacterial communities and genes found in the guts of breast-fed vs. formula-fed (cow’s milk) 3-month-olds.

The researchers studied the gut microbiome information and gene expression levels in the infant gut; they identified genes involved in immunity and defense with altered expression levels in relation to the gut bacteria in breast-fed infants.

Breast-fed babies, it emerged, had more diverse gut biota, but their immune systems were ready primed for it. This was almost paradoxical. The babies’ fecal matter had more of the obnoxious, virulent organisms (including resistance to antibiotics and toxic compounds), yet the infant immune system was well primed and ready to shoot!

What seems to happen is that killer defence genes are activated in the young immune system by the challenge of meeting hostile pathogens.

So it is, in a way, confirmation of the so-called “hygiene hypothesis: if you stay too clean and try to hide from germs, they will get you, because your immune system is compromised from the get-go. Our human microbiome actually EDUCATES the immune system.

The key part, though, is the finding suggesting that human milk promotes the beneficial crosstalk between the immune system and microbe population in the gut, and so maintains intestinal stability.

It’s yet another reason not to give kids that garbage from cows, raw or sterilized. Dump that raw milk pansy story, once and for all. It has no relevance or benefit to human development and weakens the immune defences.

Breast is best!

Of course this strongly re-inforces everything I wrote in my new book ”Fire In The Belly” about why inflammatory human microbes in the gut MUST be suppressed and replaced with healthy organisms of the kind we need. A healthy immune system and our very lives depend on it!

If you don’t have Fire In The Belly, go here and see why you need it:

Fire In The Belly info page

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Hatch Project Division of Nutritional Sciences Vision, and the United States Department of Agriculture – National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA–NIFA) Grant Designing Foods for Health. One author is supported by the College of Arts and Science at Miami University. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

[Genome Biol. Published online April 30, 2012. Abstract]

It would be a bad doctor who said, “So what?” we shouldn’t vaccinate. It needs thinking about carefully in context

It appears that deaths from measles are falling rapidly. That’s cause for celebration. Measles is pretty deadly, never forget that. For sure, part of this decline is misdiagnosing the real cause of death. But I accept a genuine decline.

The researchers found measles deaths worldwide fell from more than 535,000 in 2000 to around 139,000 in 2010. That’s a pretty big fall off (75% drop). We can’t put everything down to faking results.

The big question is: how much of the fall is due to the measles vaccination program? How much of it would happen anyway?

It is idle (and stupid) to simply dismiss any benefits, just because the measles vaccine seems very likely implicated in toxic nerve inflammations afterwards. If there is good and there is harm, the question is: do they balance?

No deaths is good. Would you rather have no deaths and autism? Or would you rather have the deaths than risk that any medical interference might trigger autism?

If you think the answer is easy, you either don’t understand the question, or you are ignorant and prejudiced, in my view. It’s a very difficult epidemiological question and it polarizes even holistic doctors.

I’m talking a LOT of deaths, for heaven’s sake. Every single day measles still claims 382 lives worldwide — a vast majority of them children under 5. Almost half of those deaths (47 percent) occurred in India, and more than one-third (36 percent) in Africa.

Other areas in southeast Asia accounted for 8 percent of deaths; the eastern Mediterranean region, 7 percent; the western Pacific region, 2 percent; and the Americas and Europe less than 1 percent each.

In the United States there have been no reported measles deaths since 2008 and very few actual cases indeed. That can only be due to the vaccination program, since I see no big improvements in public lifestyle or nutrition over that period to account for overcoming the disease.

Of course health officials are crowing: Vaccination is the only way to prevent measles, they say. Mass vaccination programs around the globe “were the main driver behind the huge fall in mortality,” the researchers said, noting more than 1 billion doses of measles vaccine were dispensed over the past decade.

Nearly all cases that did occur stemmed from foreign travel, and a majority of those who developed the disease had not been vaccinated, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week.

Ah, well, they always say that. When people who have been vaccinated get they disease, they STILL mark it down as “not vaccinated” because, they say to themselves, there must have been a mistake, or the vaccine “didn’t take”!

And of course they still quote the “discrediting” of Andrew Wakefield, even though he was NOT discredited. Wakefield found that autistic kids were harboring a rogue measles virus in the gut.

But they sent in a journalist hack to discredit him and so now they don’t have to look into any problems caused by vaccination: there aren’t any, it was just a nasty, twisted doctor!

All in the garden is sweet smelling roses!

[April 23, 2012, The Lancet, online]

I’ve been telling you this for years. The heavy metal toxicity page is always among the top 2 -3 entry pages for www.alternative-doctor.com

Heavy metals cause cancer. There are a number of culprits:

1. arsenic and arsenic compounds,
2. beryllium and beryllium compounds,
3. cadmium and cadmium compounds,
4. nickel compounds and
5. hexavalent chromium (remember the movie “Erin Brockovich”?)

A recent study has focused, yet again, on the effects of cadmium and the way it may fuel the growth of some breast cancer cells and encourage them to spread.

Cadmium is found in many farm fertilizers and can make its way into soil and water. Some of the other main sources of cadmium include cigarette smoke, rechargeable batteries, certain cosmetics, bread and other cereals, potatoes, root crops and vegetables.

Unlike previous research, this new analysis looks at lifetime exposure to cadmium, not acute bursts of high levels of the heavy metal. This is important, of course, because this more closely mimics the way we are exposed on a chronic basis.

The researchers are still trying to figure out if the cadmium causes the cancers or cancers attract cadmium. But the message is simple. Get your body clear of this metal, along with all the others.

Cadmium acts like an estrogen in the human body. So it’s bad for men too. According to the new study findings, breast cancer cells can pass through the outer barrier of the breast with prolonged cadmium exposure.

Specifically, cells chronically exposed to cadmium express higher levels of SDF-1, a protein associated with tumor invasion and cancer spread, the study showed.

It is difficult to reduce exposure to cadmium, but there are other things women can do to lower their risk for breast cancer. Eat a healthy diet, don’t drink a lot of alcohol and maintain a normal body weight. Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t.

[April 23, 2012, presentation, Experimental Biology 2012 meeting, San Diego]