Crony Capitalism | Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health

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

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 18:02:08 +0000

Related article: Big Food vs. Big Medicine: One Fluid, the Other Frozen
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TPP Deal Finally Revealed

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:27:52 +0000

Details of the long-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership are public at last: it will undermine the safety of our food supply, make medicine more expensive, and give power to the biotech monopoly. Action Alert!
A few weeks ago, the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal was finally released after many years of closed-door negotiations between officials from the US and eleven other countries, all of whom border the Pacific Ocean. Its provisions were apparently kept secret from all but the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.
Leaked documents during the trade negotiations provided reason to be concerned about the final agreement. And now, a review of the deal’s twenty-nine chapters and five thousand pages proves these early concerns were completely justified. The final package now awaits a vote in Congress, which is likely to take place in Spring 2016.
Here are some of the most pressing concerns for natural health advocates:

It Undermines the Safety of the Food Supply

The TPP contains a number of provisions that threaten current food safety laws.
Generally speaking, passage of the TPP would mean that any US food safety law concerning things like pesticides, food additives, or labeling that is more stringent than “international standards” may be considered an “illegal barrier” to trade, and subject to enforcement. We have learned to beware of such “international standards.” They are largely determined by global special interests.
The TPP expands corporate power in other ways. The deal includes an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system in which multinational corporations can challenge a host company’s regulations in an international court. ISDS has been a fixture in other trade treaties, including NAFTA (the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement), and has been used to challenge countries’ economic policies, anti-smoking efforts, and environmental preservation laws. It is another giveaway to Big Food and other powerful multinational interests—a recurring theme throughout the TPP document.
The trade agreement also undercuts US efforts to inspect food imports. The agreement limits food import inspections at the border “to what is reasonable and necessary,” and if an issue arises, a country must also provide an “opportunity for a review of the decision.” This provision, referred to as the Rapid Response Mechanism, may give exporting countries the right to challenge basic food safety provisions in the US.

It Gives New Patent Protections to Big Pharma

The TPP contains an entire chapter on intellectual property rights, with many provisions relating to pharmaceutical patents. No doubt heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, the trade deal will force signatory countries to accept many of the same patent laws that have kept drug prices so astronomically high in the US.
The deal would extend and broaden certain patent and data protections for the pharmaceutical industry, which Big Pharma can then use to keep prices high and delay competition from generics. It is a wonderful gift to the pharmaceutical industry—but a grave loss to patients in developing countries looking for access to affordable drugs.
The TPP also allows a practice known as “evergreening,” which lets drug companies extend a patent on an old drug when it can be used to treat a new condition—another boon for Big Pharma’s monopoly power.
Even when Big Pharma loses in the TPP, it wins. One of the more controversial topics in TPP negotiations concerned patent and data protections for biologic drugs—medicines derived not from inert chemical compounds but from living organisms. Big Pharma wanted twelve years of exclusivity— they already have this in the US—and US trade officials pushed hard in the negotiations to make this the standard. Instead, the deal grants them at least five years of exclusivity and as much as eight.

It’s Also a Gift to Biotech Seed Companies

Finally, the TPP deal expands biotech’s monopoly over the seed industry. The deal requires all twelve countries to join a number of global intellectual property treaties. One of these treaties is the 1991 International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV91), which emphasizes the rights of seed companies over farmers. Among other things, UPOV91:

Requires intellectual property (IP) protection for all plant species;
Provides IP protection for 20 to 25 years; and
Stops farmers from exchanging seeds—a common and important practice in many developing nations and indeed throughout human history.

In countries that have not already turned agriculture over to the biotech industry, this could mean a substantial rewrite of regulations meant to protect farmers.
Other treaties that signatory countries are compelled to join make it easier to apply for patents—making it very likely that more plants and seeds will be patented.
If these gifts to industry were not enough, President Obama moved earlier this summer to have the deal “fast-tracked”—that is, Congress will be given a fixed period to review the agreement, after which time legislators must make a yes/no vote without the possibility of amending the deal. Essentially, it’s “take it or leave it.”
We say: leave it. And if the US does reject it, do not worry about losing the reduction of tariffs that is already included. There will just be a second (and, we hope, a better) version to replace it.
Action Alert! Write to your members of Congress and urge them to oppose the TPP deal, which undermines consumers and farmers and extends monopoly rights to major industries. Please send your message immediately.

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:
Eleven States Join the Push for Medical Monopoly
Coca-Cola Scandal: Emails Prove Deception
“Agent Orange” Herbicide Pulled by EPA

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Coca-Cola Scandal: Emails Prove Deception

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:16:38 +0000

Coke exec steps down after emails show the company was intentionally skewing the science about the health effects of its products.
Last week, the Associated Press published emails showing close coordination between high-ranking Coca-Cola executives and leaders of the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), a nonprofit that claims to fund research into causes of obesity, but instead promotes the idea that lack of exercise, not bad diet, is primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic.
The scandal has resulted in the immediate retirement of the chief architect of the partnership, Coke’s top science and health officer Rhona Applebaum.
As we reported previously, Coke’s financial ties to the organization were initially uncovered by a New York Times story that Coke had donated over $1.5 million to GEBN. This raised obvious questions as to Coke’s influence over GEBN and the research it was putting out to the public—concerns that Coke denied.
The leaked emails tell a vastly different story: that GEBN was a Coca-Cola public relations project from the very beginning.
One email shows Applebaum telling James Hill—the future president of GEBN—that she has “sold the concept” of creating GEBN to her superiors, later saying that anyone involved in the project must be open to “collaboration” with private industry (“That is non-negotiable,” she writes).
After Hill becomes president, he emails a Coke executive and says the focus of the company’s research should be “energy balance”—code words for looking solely at calories consumed vs. calories expended, when natural health is founded on the premise that the content of those calories is vital to both health and weight management. “We have given you ideas here,” Hill writes to Coca-Cola. “We have also given you ideas for research projects that might be very specific to coke [sic] interests.”
Other emails demonstrate the real purpose of GEBN, with Applebaum explaining that the group will “inject sanity and reason” into the obesity debate and will be “akin to a political campaign” in which Coke will “develop, deploy and evolve a powerful and multi-faceted strategy to counter radical organizations and their proponents.” For example, to a proposal that GEBN should partner with other companies on a particular project, Applebaum says in an email: “There you go! Than [sic] the # of experts and reputable orgs is too large for any naysayers to cull the pack and attack.”
And just to show you how cynical both organizations were in their strategizing, Hill actually calls Coke “a company selling sugar water” in one email—which doesn’t provoke any argument from Applebaum.
Of course other industries, including Big Pharma, play the same game. It is all part of today’s crony capitalism, in which special interests are subverting all of our institutions, including government—not to mention creating a revolving-door policy for officials to go from government positions to powerful industry jobs and back again. Standards of truth are disintegrating in a spreading tide of deception and corruption.

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

TPP a Disaster for Natural Health
Eleven States Join the Push for Medical Monopoly
“Agent Orange” Herbicide Pulled by EPA

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Big Pharma Connections? No Problem, Says Nominee for FDA Chief

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 19:59:59 +0000

Robert Califf doesn’t think his many ties to pharmaceutical companies will affect his objectivity in regulating the industry. Congress seems to agree, but we don’t. Action Alert!
Last Tuesday, President Obama’s nominee to take charge of the federal Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Robert Califf, defended his longstanding ties to Big Pharma in a Senate confirmation hearing in which few lawmakers seemed to oppose his candidacy.
By now, Dr. Califf’s lucrative dealings with the drug industry are well known. He ran a clinical research center at Duke University that received the majority of its multi-million dollar budget from Pharma. According to financial disclosures from last year, Dr. Califf received money for consulting with at least seven drug and medical device companies, and six other companies supported his university salary including Merck, Novartis, and Eli Lilly. The conflict of interest section of a paper he wrote for the European Heart Journal last year lists financial support from more than twenty companies.
All of this has led Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard political science professor and an expert on the FDA, to call Califf the “ultimate industry insider.” Indeed, the New York Times notes that “he has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory.”
The FDA has increasingly been doing the bidding of Big Pharma, since the drug companies pay the agency’s bills and provide lucrative post-government employment opportunities. Califf’s nomination shows that federal officials are dropping all pretenses of picking someone who would actually protect public health or stand up to industry, and instead are baldly installing a fox to guard the henhouse.
Action Alert! Tell Congress to oppose the nomination of Dr. Califf to FDA Commissioner. Please send your message immediately.

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

Monsanto’s Spy Software to Control the Entire Agriculture Market
Plan for an End Run around GMO Labeling
Feds Crack Down on Criminal Supplement Dealer

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Big Food Once Again Tries to Muscle in on Kids’ School Lunch Trays

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 17:37:36 +0000

Please oppose a new House bill that puts corporate profits ahead of children’s health. Action Alert!
A 2002 federal program that delivers fresh fruits and vegetables to the country’s poorest schools is now at risk because of crony capitalism. Lobbyists from the frozen, fried, canned, and dried food industries are all jostling to have their products included in the government program, and their efforts are paying off. Reps. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR) have recently introduced legislation that would broaden the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program to include frozen, canned, dried, and pureed fruits and vegetables.
The Big Food lobbies contend that the legislation should be rewritten to include “all forms” of fruits and vegetables, even including highly processed and fried foods. This kind of change would open the door to all kinds of absurdities that we’ve seen in the past, such as the attempt to define pizza as a vegetable. Big Food also influenced the decision to count French fries as a vegetable. Is this what we want for the country’s most vulnerable children?
Unlike many other school nutrition programs, the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, when it was initially introduced into the 2002 Farm Bill by former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), specifically stipulated that the snacks contain only real fresh fruits and vegetables. Costing around $177 million each year, it is a relatively small part of $16 billion that the federal government spends on school meals, but an important area where junk food lobbies do not dominate the menu.
Unsurprisingly, the program was susceptible to crony influences from the moment it was created. For the first six years, dried fruit was allowed—a bit of pork carved out by a California congressman who had raisin interests in his district. This led schools to use the federal dollars to buy trail mix.
It’s an old story. We’ve reported on the flourishing crony influences on federal school meal programs a number of times over the years. When there are billions of dollars at stake, Big Food will almost always work its connections in agencies like the USDA to muscle its way onto the school lunch tray.
The result of all this, of course, is that our kids—in this particular case, kids in some of the poorest school districts in the country—are served low-quality, low-cost, highly processed junk food, courtesy of the federal government.
Action Alert! Write to your congressional representative and urge him or her to oppose HR 3532, the Fruit and Vegetable Access for Children Act, which would make school lunches and snacks significantly less healthy. Please send your message immediately.

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New Evidence that Antidepressants Are Causing an Epidemic of Violence

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:17:26 +0000

An article in the current British Medical Journal explains why the link is stronger than previously thought. Action Alert!
ANH-USA has researched dozens of the most high-profile cases of violent crimes over the last few decades. We found that in just under half of the cases (eleven out of twenty-three), the perpetrator was documented to be taking, or had recently stopped taking, some form of antidepressant or antipsychotic medication.
In another seven cases, the killer had been on these medications earlier. We suspect that number is even higher, but the information is either not publicly available or not known.
Other publications support these findings. Mother Jones looked at all mass shootings from 1982 through 2015—seventy-two incidents altogether. Of these, more than half of the perpetrators (forty-three) had shown signs of mental illness prior to the crime. Given the propensity of conventional doctors to prescribe antidepressants and other antipsychotic drugs (more on this below), it does not seem like a large leap to assume that many of these perpetrators were taking medications.
The FDA recognizes this, and many antidepressants carry “black box warnings,” the most stringent precaution a drug label can carry before being removed from the market. Many antidepressants carry a black box warning of an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Dr. Robert Whitaker notes that there is also a shocking risk of increased violence to others, which is not highlighted in the black box.
Important research has shown major drugs like Paxil and Prozac to be linked with violence at a substantially higher rate than other drugs—users of Paxil are 10.3 times more likely to do violence to themselves or others, while users of Prozac are 10.9 times more likely to commit acts of violence. Other evidence shows that people who have exhibited no propensity for violence or aggression can develop violent behavior soon after beginning antidepressants. (You can find still more evidence of the link between antidepressants and violence in our previous coverage of the topic.)
The FDA relies on studies conducted by major drug companies themselves, which may not be reliable. Even if the data is pristine, the interpretation will almost certainly be skewed in favor of the drug.
Consider the case of Paxil. Fourteen years ago the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), published a study which was interpreted to mean that Paxil was safe and effective for teens. A new analysis of that same data, published this week in the prestigious British Medical Journal, found the exact opposite to be true—that teenagers on Paxil did no better than a placebo on a standard depression assessment, and that GSK had seriously downplayed the drug’s dangerous side effects!
This reinterpretation was only possible because GSK, to its credit, allowed the data to become public. It should be noted, however, that this was only done once the patent had gotten older and was thus less valuable.
Suicide and violence are just two side effects of antidepressants. There have been a total 134 warnings from regulatory agencies in eleven countries including:

30 warnings that antidepressants cause heart problems
21 warnings that they cause birth defects
6 warnings that they cause anxiety
5 warnings that they cause mania or psychosis
4 warnings that they cause death
4 warnings that they cause hallucinations or delusional thinking
4 warnings that they cause involuntary movements
2 warnings that they cause sexual dysfunction

There is a great deal we don’t know, partly because so much of drug companies’ research on these drugs is kept secret. But the correlation between violent crime and the use of these legal, mind-altering prescription drugs is too strong to be ignored, while scientific evidence of the connection continues to mount. So why hasn’t the FDA done anything?
The answer should be clear enough. Antidepressants are some of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US. About 10% of Americans—30 million people—are on antidepressants, which includes 25% of women in their 40s and 50s. Antidepressant use has increased an astounding 400% in recent years. This translates into billions of dollars in profits worldwide for the pharmaceutical industry. And drug company money represent a substantial percentage of the FDA’s operating budget.
What is especially tragic about the wide use of antidepressants and their connection to violence and other terrible side effects is the fact that there are far safer, natural alternatives. We’ve reported before about some of these.
Sometimes depression is triggered by a life event or series of events. But what conventional medicine generally fails to notice is the connection between the brain and the body—how the body, and especially the gut, can have a profound effect on the brain, and vice versa. In some cases, it is a simple nutrient that is missing. It is often B vitamins, or it may be a mineral such as magnesium.
An integrative approach to medicine also addresses the imbalances in the body that may cause our mood to be out of whack. Consider that 95% of the body’s serotonin, the chemical that most depression drugs try to increase, is found in the gut. The standard American diet does not optimize either serotonin or gut health, leading to leaky gut syndrome and sustained inflammation.
Antibiotic use can also lead to gut dysbiosis and leaky gut because they destroy the good bacteria lining the intestines, allowing pathogenic bacteria to colonize. When the lining of the digestive system becomes permeable, toxic substances and bacteria leak into the bloodstream, triggering food sensitivities, inflammation, and autoimmune problems.
Additionally, hormone imbalances caused by hypothyroidism, which often goes undiagnosed, may cause mental health problems. Many people taking antidepressant medications, then, should really be addressing the underlying thyroid issue.
To find an integrative doctor in your area who won’t simply prescribe Prozac but will address the root cause, click here for some helpful links.
This is a life-or-death issue. How many more violent crimes will we have to endure before something is done about SSRIs and other mental health medications?
A recent news story told of new protocols and training at the University of Virginia Medical Center, preparing staff for the possibility of a gunman on a shooting rampage, which the Emergency Manager Coordinator views as an “unfortunate inevitability.” The irony of this is completely lost on the hospital staff. They see no connection whatsoever between the drugs they are prescribing and the “inevitable” shooter they are preparing for.
In 2011, ANH submitted a Citizen Petition to the FDA asking them to expand the current black box warning on antidepressants to include the danger of violent actions toward other people, in addition to the current suicide warning. This request has so far fallen on deaf ears. This time, we are reaching out to Congress to see if they can urge the FDA to act on this crucial issue.
Action Alert! Congress recently observed Mental Health Awareness Month. Write to your legislators and urge them to take meaningful steps towards addressing this serious issue—such as directing the FDA to update their black box warnings of antidepressants to include warnings of increased violent behavior. Please send your message immediately.

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Cronyism is Putting Diabetic Patients at Risk

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:28:52 +0000

New legislation could limit patient access to unbiased diabetes advice. Action Alert!
A bill before Congress called the Access to Quality Diabetes Education Act of 2015 (HR 1726, S 1345) and state efforts by the American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) will make it more difficult for Medicare patients with diabetes to get the help they need to overcome the disease.
The AADE—a private association—offers certification programs that diabetes educators can voluntarily pursue. These programs require an investment of thousands of dollars and a tremendous number of hours.
The so-called Access to Quality Diabetes Education Act (which opponents are appropriately calling the #DiabetesMiseducation Act) and other state legislative efforts would turn this currently voluntary certification into a legal requirement under Medicare—a costly, unnecessary obstacle for thousands of healthcare workers which, if passed, would leave countless diabetic patients without access to important, life-altering services.
There is something else you need to know about AADE. It does not strike us as an independent, objective organization; in fact, it receives large sums of money from Big Pharma. The organization’s 2014 annual report shows that its top two corporate donors were pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and Novo Nordisk, with Eli Lilly not far behind.
So here we go again. Why compete for customers with the best products or services when you can sew them up in a government-enforced monopoly?
We’ve seen similar attempts at the state level on the part of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) to create monopolies for registered dieticians to the detriment of other nutrition professionals. The AND works to pass free speech-gagging legislation which prevents qualified nutrition experts, even some with PhDs in nutrition, from practicing. The result is that consumers are prevented from seeing the nutritionist of their choice. Following recent legal victories and a Supreme Court case, ANH-USA is working to reverse these monopolistic scope-of-practice laws.
Like the AND, the AADE has attempted to create mandatory certification requirements at the state level, but has been almost completely unsuccessful—only Kentucky has enacted the legislation. Now the AADE seems to be trying its luck on the federal level.
Diabetes is a rampant, ever-worsening health problem: one recent study found that half of adults in the US have diabetes or is pre-diabetic. Diabetes is often, but not always, the result of obesity, poor diet, and lack of exercise. The standard American diet tends to create insulin resistance. New studies have emerged showing that consuming highly processed starches is akin to eating sugar, causing rapid glucose spikes that may over time induce insulin resistance and, eventually, type 2 diabetes.
As we mentioned above, diabetes requires a complete overhaul of one’s life and habits. As ANH-Europe’s executive and scientific director Dr. Robert Verkerk notes,

Critical to resolving our type 2 diabetes “epidemic” is the issue not only of how much we eat, and how much starch we eat, but when we eat. Calorie restriction and intermittent fasting are absolutely key to dealing with the present diabetes crisis, alongside getting in more genuinely whole, unprocessed food and fiber.

As conventional doctors often lack the resources to provide such support to diabetic patients—or, as we’ve reported previously, provide seriously misguided information on how to manage or reverse the disease—health coaches and diabetes educators become particularly important. In fact, one study showed that nearly twice as many coached patients were able to successfully control their diabetes as those with no coach.
And what about those drugs for diabetes that the donors to AADE want to sell? They can be extremely dangerous. And there are natural substances that can be very useful such as the herb berberine.
Action Alert! Write to your legislators and urge them to oppose HR 1726/S 1345, the Access to Qualified Diabetes Education Act. Please send your message immediately

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Crony Dentistry Once Again Puts Children at Risk

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 19:51:37 +0000

Medical device companies appear to be trying to buy dentists, exposing children to high levels of unnecessary radiation.
The New York Times ran a story a few years ago illustrating the extent to which cronyism (showing partiality to long-standing friends for mutual financial benefit, rather than following good science) determines medical care—in this instance, dental X-rays.
While some doctors have starting trying to reduce the amount of radiation children and adolescents are exposed to, dentists have begun using a particular kind of scanner that emits significantly more radiation than conventional methods. The device is called a cone-beam CT scanner, and it’s used to take three-dimensional images of teeth, supposedly providing dentists with the ability to see problems better.
One problem is that almost no independent research confirms the marketing claims. The Times reports that

The cone beam’s popularity has been fueled in part by misinformation about its safety and efficacy, some of it coming from dentists paid or sponsored by manufacturers to give speeches [and] seminars and continuing education classes.

The Times even reported that the Journal of the American Dental Association allowed one cone-beam manufacturer to fund an entire issue devoted to the technology!
To regular Pulse readers, this cronyism may sound all too familiar. We recently reported on some of the latest numbers in the long-established trend of Big Pharma paying doctors to promote their products, shelling out millions for doctors to attend conferences in exotic locations like the Cayman Islands and bankrolling lavish food and beverage tabs, or paying doctors to help with “research.”
One need only follow the money to understand why this happens. In 2010, more than 3,000 scanners and thirty different models had been sold, for up to $250,000 apiece. Dentists can turn a tidy profit as well, charging up to several hundred dollars per scan. Some orthodontists are also using cone-beam CT scans.
The new dental scanners produce anywhere from four to sixty-seven times as much radiation as conventional X-rays. Dental scanners are a variant on the CT scanners you find in doctors’ offices which, on average, emit as much radiation as 200 conventional chest X-rays. And if you visit more than one doctor, you may get more and more of these without one doctor having any idea of what the other doctor has done.
And young patients are five to ten times more sensitive to radiation than adults.
One of our ANH-USA team members recently had a root canal tooth extracted. He knew the oral surgeon would require an X-ray, but wasn’t even told it would be a CT scan until it was underway. Nor did the assistant offer the thyroid gland shield or the eye shield recommended by the FDA. Unfortunately, stories like these suggest that parents—indeed, all of us—must remain vigilant.

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“21st Century Cures” Bill Is Actually a Throwback to the 20th Century

Tue, 12 May 2015 16:45:31 +0000

This legislation reveals once again that government will always be decades behind cutting-edge healthcare, and beholden to special interests as well. Action Alert!
After a year of discussions and negotiation, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-CO) and Fred Upton (R-MI), together with three other co-sponsors, finally released a preliminary draft of their 21st Century Cures bill.
It’s clear that the authors intend this bill to be landmark legislation to propel healthcare innovation into a new era. In a video launching their effort, Rep. DeGette said that “America can be—it must be—the healthcare innovation capitol of the world.” In the hearing that the Energy and Commerce Committee held on the draft, proponents invoked President Kennedy’s plan to go to the moon in a description of the boldness and scope of their vision.
Will this bill be the harbinger of a new era in healthcare in the United States? So far, it doesn’t look like it.
The bill is still in draft form, and significant portions of the text are still being negotiated. We had a number of criticisms of older drafts of the bill, and the good news is that a number of them were addressed in the latest draft.
The biggest victory was the elimination of several provisions that would have extended market exclusivity for Big Pharma drugs. All but one of these provisions were removed. Unfortunately, proposed language still seeks to extend the patents of drugs that were originally rejected if they can be repurposed for serious and life-threatening diseases—still a clear giveaway to Big Pharma.
We also had concerns with a provision calling for a study of patients with chronic diseases without including input from integrative doctors, since true chronic disease prevention must include nutrition and lifestyle factors. It appears that this provision has been removed.
We previously commented on the draft bill’s treatment of the antibiotics issue, which remains extremely problematic. While it appears that market exclusivity for certain antimicrobial drugs has been removed, the focus of the bill is still on developing new antibiotic drugs. The logic here makes the mind reel: the overuse of antibiotics is what has led to the current problem of antibiotic resistance, yet the answer provided by the bill’s authors is to develop more antibiotics—rather than explore natural alternatives that we’ve written about at length.
The sections dealing with vaccination remain unchanged. We would like to see a requirement that the government investigate all adverse event report (AER) data. As we reported previously, the government currently refuses to look at AERs, taking the position that correlation does not equal causation. In particular, the data about adverse events from vaccines raises some serious red flags that need to be investigated thoroughly.
The bill also includes an expedited review-and-approval process for “breakthrough vaccines,” especially in the face of public health crises, but it doesn’t put important safeguards in place to protect the public, such as informed consent or post-market studies.
The bill, even after the changes that were made, is still a far cry from the lofty rhetoric supplied by its authors about innovation and ushering in a new era of healthcare in America. It offers nothing substantially new or innovative, just more of the same outdated thinking. In our view, a real 21st century healthcare system would shift the paradigm away from healthcare modalities that don’t work and aren’t sustainable—as we’ve seen in the case of antibiotic overuse—and toward healthcare that is aimed at prevention, testing, and natural remedies. The bill’s authors stress that their intent is to put the patient at the center of care, but continue with the current government-mandated, monopoly-supported, “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Here are a few our suggestions for what a real 21st century health system would look like:

Less emphasis on pharmaceutical interventions as the only “cure”;
Patients and medical professionals educated on “real” disease prevention through advanced testing, diet, nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle;
The growing problem of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” addressed by banning antibiotic overuse on factory farms as well as their over-prescription, while encouraging the use of natural alternatives such hyperbaric oxygen therapy or treatments that include silver, intravenous vitamin C, the herbs Cat’s Claw and Artemisia, some essential oils, or grapefruit seed extract, along with much more research on natural cures;
Improved access to natural health practitioners along with greater respect for informed choice in healthcare; and
Endorsement of individualized medicine at the heart of the new paradigm.

We will continue to monitor this legislation as the final language gels, and we’ll let you know what is happening.
Action Alert! Write to the bill’s sponsors and ask them to make changes to the bill so it can actually live up to the name of “21st Century Cures.” Please send your message immediately.

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Federal Dietary Guidelines Being Criticized Even by Government Cronies

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 19:49:44 +0000

Yale scientists don’t get it right either!
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), run jointly by the USDA and Health and Human Services, has been working on releasing its 2015 report about what our diet should look like. This is revised and updated every five years.
We covered this recently because the committee finally came around to seeing the error in its previous warnings about dietary cholesterol. The committee now admits that “cholesterol is [no longer] considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.”
The committee’s recommendations, though, seem to have a lot of people upset. The preliminary DGAC report called for a “plant-based” diet, which has the meat industry and some legislators on Capitol Hill up in arms.
Other aspects of the report that have drawn attention are measures to promote a “culture of health”—including a soda tax, a dessert tax, and electronic tracking of the use of “screen-based” technologies to deter sedentary lifestyles that lead to obesity.
To address these and other concerns about the report, the open comment period has been extended to May 8. And it is clear that any food group (like the meat, soda, or dessert industry) that feels it has been maligned by the DGAC’s guidelines will simply use its considerable influence to get more favorable treatment. It’s next to impossible to avoid crony-capitalist influence over such guidelines—which is one reason the government should not be in the business of telling people what or how to eat.
Cronyism isn’t the only problem, though. DGAC is always woefully out of date on nutrition, and not just about cholesterol. One glaring example is vitamin D. DGAC bases its estimates on the amount of essential vitamins we need on the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommended levels, which we’ve shown before to be grossly inadequate. As a point of reference, the IOM now recommends 600 IU (international units) of vitamin D for people between the ages of 1 and 70. Note that the recommendation is identical for people of all ages and weight, which is absurd. The previous recommendation was a mere 200 IU—whereas Harvard and the Vitamin D Council recommend anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 IU a day. Also of concern is the report’s caution against dietary supplements as a means to achieve their recommended levels, despite supplements’ well-established safety record.
The report also advises Americans to reduce their consumption of saturated fat, presumably because of an alleged link to heart disease. Yet more up-to-date evidence shows that saturated fat does not cause heart disease and actually has a number of health benefits.
Finally, as mentioned above, the report recommends a diet low in red meat. But, as we’ve shown in the past, not all red meat is created equal: meat from corn-fed, CAFO-raised cows is quite different in nutrient composition than meat from grass-fed, organically raised cows, which is high in healthy omega-3 fatty acids.
Rather than telling us what to eat, government at all levels should instead stop gagging free speech about nutrition, an issue we’ve covered extensively in the Pulse of Natural Health. It is absurd, on the one hand, to be subjected to government health guidelines that are obsolete and likely tainted with crony influence, and on the other hand to be prevented from sharing nutrition advice with friends without a special license or consulting the nutritionist of our choice.
Nutrition is a science, which means that data and appropriate conclusions are constantly changing. Even some distinguished scientists can get it very wrong.
Consider an effort by Yale scientists to create a chart that would rank all foods in general from best to worst. This is very difficult, because all foods have advantages and disadvantages. It only makes things worse if you still labor under the old idea that saturated fat is bad.
Let’s look at one example: these Yale scientists say that nonfat milk is “very good” with a high rating of 100, while 2% milk has only a rating of 84, and whole milk has a rating of 52. But cream-topped whole milk at least is more natural and possibly safer, if you can find it non-homogenized (homogenization changes the fat molecules). A recent study also found that consuming high-fat dairy products is linked to a reduction in the risk of developing type-2 diabetes. Other strange outcomes on the Yale list: brown eggs (also linked to reduced risk of type-2 diabetes) are ranked very low with a score of 33, while Pepperidge Farms Whole Grain Bread is ranked higher with a score of 51.
Our grade for this whole list is an F. It misleads more than it helps.

The post Federal Dietary Guidelines Being Criticized Even by Government Cronies first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.