Harvard Study Finds Fluoride Lowers IQ - Published in Federal Gov't Journal

Market Watch


PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Harvard University researchers' review of fluoride/brain studies concludes "our results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children's neurodevelopment." It was published online July 20 in Environmental Health Perspectives, a US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' journal (1), reports the NYS Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc. (NYSCOF)

"The children in high fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ than those who lived in low fluoride areas," write Choi et al.

Further, the EPA says fluoride is a chemical "with substantial evidence of developmental neurotoxicity."

Fluoride (fluosilicic acid) is added to US water supplies at approximately 1 part per million attempting to reduce tooth decay.

Water was the only fluoride source in the studies reviewed and was based on high water fluoride levels. However, they point out research by Ding (2011) suggested that low water fluoride levels had significant negative associations with children's intelligence.

Choi et al. write, "Although fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in animal models and acute fluoride poisoning causes neurotoxicity in adults, very little is known of its effects on children's neurodevelopment. They recommend more brain/fluoride research on children and at individual-level doses.

"It's senseless to keep subjecting our children to this ongoing fluoridation experiment to satisfy the political agenda of special-interest groups," says attorney Paul Beeber, NYSCOF President. "Even if fluoridation reduced cavities, is tooth health more important than brain health? It's time to put politics aside and stop artificial fluoridation everywhere," says Beeber.

After reviewing fluoride toxicological data, the NRC reported in 2006, "It's apparent that fluorides have the ability to interfere with the functions of the brain."

Choi's team writes, "Fluoride readily crosses the placenta. Fluoride exposure to the developing brain, which is much more susceptible to injury caused by toxicants than is the mature brain, may possibly lead to damage of a permanent nature."

Fluoride accumulates in the body. Even low doses are harmful to babies, the thyroid, kidney patients and heavy water-drinkers. There are even doubts about fluoridation's effectiveness. New York City Legislation is pending to stop fluoridation. Many communities have already stopped.

Infant formula when mixed with fluoridated water delivers 100-200 times more fluoride than breastmilk.

Does This Aspartame Make My Butt Look Fat?

From the Trenches World Report

Huffington Post: In April, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study linking diet soda consumption to an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. Nobody blinked or cared because this research was just going to be thrown on the pile of allegedly conflicting studies about the safety of artificial sweeteners, particularly aspartame. This pile is referred to as the “aspartame controversy.”

Aspartame is the artificial sweetener sold under the brand names of Equal and NutraSweet. It is used commonly in diet sodas because it tastes the most like sugar, or at least that is what the people selling it say. Despite all the hype about controversy, there is no aspartame controversy. All of the aspartame-industry-sponsored research consistently concludes aspartame is safe, while the independent studies overwhelmingly find side effects and problems. There is no gray area between the two sides. Every study connected to those who sell it says aspartame is safe while the independent studies find concerns. The controversy is really over whether research funded by special interest groups is valid.

Mere mortals, like myself, might be tempted to ignore inconvenient facts if my livelihood or survival were threatened. When I was a teenager, I worked at a family restaurant famous for its generous portions of homemade pies and cheesecake. As a newbie waitress, I was surprised when customers would order dessert while insisting I bring artificial sweetener (saccharine, at that time) with their coffee.

How could any one believe forgoing the 16 calories in a sugar packet (I looked it up) would balance out the 500-plus calories in the coconut cream pie? Since these customers were kindly funding my college education through generous tips and the base salary at the time was $1.15 an hour, I wisely held my tongue. Instead, I asked them if they wanted whipped cream with their Heath bar cheesecake. (“Just a little,” was the usual response.)

At the time, I did not understand why people were counting calories. I grew up in a rural area in the 70s. Everybody I knew guzzled whole milk, and in my family, ice cream was a food group; yet few people were obese. I remember our amazing high school girls’ basketball team. My friend, Nina, was the only one who did not look like she could bench press a Holstein. The girls were tall, fit and strong but there was not a calorie counter among them.

Now, 30-something years later, the average 9-year-old understands calorie-counting, yet a near obsession level with the content of food only seems to be feeding the weight gain epidemic. Despite easy availability of reduced calorie and artificially sweetened food/beverages we are expanding by the minute so that 68 percent of Americans are now overweight.

Caloric sweeteners like sugar and corn syrup certainly deserve some of the blame. Their consumption increased almost 40 percent between the 50s and 1999, when peak consumption levels reached a pancreas-busting 155 pounds per person per year — or 52 teaspoons of sugar a day. Or one of those rain-barrel-sized drinks they sell with your hexane-laced burger at the drive-through. But that is another story. Since 2000, sugar intake has reduced slightly due to a minor decrease in corn-syrup sweetened soda-slurping.

But the diet drink industry is booming.

The primary non-caloric sweetener used in diet sodas and teas is aspartame. Obviously, aspartame (introduced in 1974) and its buddies are not helping people lose weight because as a society, the more diet soda we consume, the heavier we seem to get. The reason for this phenomenon has been consistently found in independent research. That is, the taste for sweets, whether delivered by sugar or artificial sweeteners, enhances appetite. The only people who seem to think diet sodas help with weight loss are the manufacturers and some registered dietitians (RDs).

A majority of RDs recommend artificial sweeteners to their clients. The American Dietetic Association has consistently supported the use of aspartame and in an “evidence-based study” attempted to bust lingering concerns about aspartame. The study reportedly concluded aspartame does not cause side effects, including weight gain. The dietitians claimed to be working independently even though some of the funding for the study came from the aspartame industry. And they want you to know the fact that the aspartame industry has generously supported the ADA through the years has no bearing on their recommendations or research. Pie, anyone?

Study: Popular Sleeping Pill Ambien Linked to Increased Death Rate

US News

A new study has linked popular sleeping pills such as Ambien and Restoril with a nearly five-fold increased risk of early death.

Researchers at Scripps Health, a nonprofit health system in San Diego, estimate that in 2010, sleeping pill use may have contributed to up to 500,000 "excess deaths" in the United States. Heavy users aren't the only ones at risk—even people who took fewer than two pills monthly are three times more likely to die than non-users, researchers say.

"We were pretty startled by the findings," says Robert Langer, one of the authors of the study, which was published in BMJ, a British medical journal owned by the British Medical Association. "Since we started trying to qualify the results of this analysis about a year ago, I'll tell you, my prescription bottle for Ambien has sat on the shelf unopened."

The study followed 10,000 sleeping pill users and 23,500 non-users in Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2006. About 1 percent of non-users died during that time, compared to 6 percent of sleeping pill users. Since the medical records available for the study didn't include the cause of death, it's unclear how sleeping pill use contributed to the higher death rate.

Langer says the team's algorithm considered both users' and non-users' age, race, body mass index, and reported alcohol and tobacco use to determine if any other conditions were contributing to the mortality rates. The team also examined death rates in users and non-users who had a secondary condition, such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or asthma. No matter how the team sliced it, sleeping pill users had higher death rates.

"We thought maybe sleeping pills are being prescribed for sicker people, so we tried to take that out of the mix in several different ways," Langer says. "The risk was the same whichever way we looked at it. To me, that was the most startling finding. It blows things like high cholesterol or diabetes out of the water."

Sleeping pills are among the most widely prescribed medications in the United States—it's been estimated that as much as 10 percent of American adults use them at least occasionally. Some studies link sleeping pill use with higher cancer rates. Langer's team found that heavy users had about a 35 percent higher risk of developing a major cancer during the study, but that pales in comparison to the 450 percent increased mortality rate, Langer says.

Representatives from Sanofi, who makes Ambien, say the Scripps study is flawed.

"Sanofi believes the limitations of the analysis go further than what the authors indicate in the article and that the conclusions drawn based on the data presented are highly questionable," the company said in a statement. "Ambien has more than 17 years of real-world experience and is safe and effective when prescribed and taken according to its labeling."

Jack Cox, a spokesman for the company, added that trouble sleeping is often a symptom of other disorders. "People taking the medicine should discuss what's causing them not to sleep and address those issues," he says.

The Scripps team is exploring potential follow up studies that would examine causes of death. "We're starting to contact places about other populations we might look at," Langer says. "It's important to try and understand what the causes of death are."

Langer says sleeping pill users can wake up in a "hangover" state, where they are at a higher risk for falls or car accidents. Overdose and drug interaction-related deaths were also likely, Langer says.

The short half-life of Zolpidem (Ambien) and Temazepam (Restoril) means they leave a users' body within a couple hours, leading many to believe they are safer than longer-lasting drugs. Langer says his study shows that's not the case.

Gates Foundation Gives $10 Million to Support Genetically Modified Cereal Crops

Natural Society
by Lisa Garber

British scientists at the John Innes Center recently won a $10 million grant from the Gates Foundation. Where’s the money going? Not surprisingly, as Gates owns over 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock, the organization is putting even more money into genetically modified cereal crops (corn, wheat and rice, to name a few).

The pledge seems righteous at face value to some, but what the Gates Foundation failed to mention is that countries like Hungary, France, India, and Poland have battled GMOs because not only do GM seeds and pesticides decrease yields over time, but GM is bad news for farmers and consumers everywhere. Putting farmers in Africa in the pockets of the likes of Monsanto and other GM companies will only lead to crop monoculture, soil depletion, water contamination, pesticide-resistant insects, and a powerless local population of sick and impoverished farmers.

And this should be of no surprise to Bill Gates, who has openly stated that Monsanto’s GMOs are the ultimate ‘solution’ to world hunger yet continues to ignore the bounty of evidence showing that they do just the opposite — crushing soil yields and impoverishing local farmers.

Perhaps even more devastating is the rising suicide toll associated with the use of Monsanto’s seeds, with a farmer committing suicide every 30 minutes thanks in part due to GMO seeds.

Gates Foundation Ignores Fact that “GM is Failing to Deliver”

The John Innes Center’s aims include engineering crops capable of harnessing nitrogen from the air. Peas and beans do this naturally, but cereal crops—as raised by conventional farmers—require chemical ammonia spread upon the field.

Opponents of GM like Pete Riley, campaign director of GM Freeze, decry that “GM is failing to deliver.” He adds, “If you look in America, yields haven’t increased by any significant amount and often go down. Now we’re seeing real, major problems for farmers in terms of weeds that are resistant to the herbicides which GM crops have been modified to tolerate.”

This is old news to farmers in north India, where earlier this year the Maharashtra state government demanded compensation from a German seed company when unsatisfactory yields of their cotton hybrids disadvantaged small farmers.

“Productivity in north India is likely to decline because of the declining potential of hybrids; the emerging problem of leaf curl virus on the new susceptible Bt-hybrids; a high level of susceptibility to sucking pests,” said Keshav Raj Kranthi, head of the Central Institute for Cotton Research. In a paper published in June 2011, Kranthi added that GM crops consume more water and nutrients, depleting the soil and requiring farmers to purchase more fertilizers (putting more money in the hands of the likes of Monsanto).

The High Cost of GM

If the earth suffers, people suffer. In February, a court in Lyon, France railed against GMOs by finding Monsanto guilty of failing to put warning labels on Lasso weedkillers, the use of which caused neurological damage like memory loss and headaches. Dangers of GM end up literally on our—the consumers’—plates; consumption of GM crops has been linked to weight gain and organ disruption.

More courts across the world are fighting genetically modified food, but one wonders how much of an effect they will have in the face of behemoth agribusinesses.

Mercury-Packed CFL Bulbs Now Found to Fry Your Skin

Activist Post
by Mike Barrett

Individuals are drawn to compact fluorescent bulbs due to their environmentally-friendly label, but anyone who has really looked into these incandescent alternatives knows of the numerous health and environmental dangers of CFL bulbs.

A recent study sheds light on just one such concern associated with the ‘green’ CFL bulbs, showing how they are capable of actually frying your skin with UVA radiation.

Following a study in Europe examining the effects of CFL bulbs on the skin, researchers from Stony Brook University in New York conducted a similar study to examine the bulbs’ impact on human skin cells. For the study, the researchers purchased CFL bulb from various locations, and then measured the amount of UV radiation emissions. What they found in every single one of the bulbs studied was “significant levels of UVC and UVA” which was a result of cracks that were present in the coating on the bulbs.

After studying the effects of these emissions on human skin cells, they discovered that healthy skin cells experienced the same damage you would find with ultraviolet radiation.

Similar tests were also conducted using incandescent light bulbs of the same intensity along with the implementation of UV-absorbing Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles, which are found within many personal care products.

While the incandescent light bulbs had no negative effect on healthy skin cells, the researchers couldn’t say the same for CFL bulbs. Professor Rafailovich recounts:

Our study revealed that the response of healthy skin cells to UV emitted from CFL bulbs is consistent with damage from ultraviolet radiation…Skin cell damage was further enhanced when low dosages of TiO2 nanoparticles were introduced to the skin cells prior to exposure.


Despite their large energy savings, consumers should be careful when using compact fluorescent light bulbs…Our research shows that it is best to avoid using them at close distances and that they are safest when placed behind an additional glass cover.

This, of course, isn’t the only issue with compact fluorescent bulbs. In addition to having a potential negative impact on your skin, these bulbs emit toxic chemicals. In fact, only months after it was found that energy saving fluorescent bulbs release carcinogenic chemicals into the air, a new study has found that these harmful chemicals are continually released from the bulbs over a period of weeks to months.

In addition to releasing these cancer-causing chemicals, which are far beyond the “safe” level set by the EPA, these bulbs also release levels of mercury which also exceed the “safe” levels for humans.

New GMO ‘Agent Orange Soy’ Silently Backed by USDA

Natural Society
by Mike Barrett

Millions of pounds of herbicides are applied to crops around the nation each year. In one single year, 2006, 96.7 million pounds of glyphosate was sprayed on soybeans alone; this is a 20-fold increase from the 4.9 million pounds in 1994, the year before Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds were introduced. Well now, biotechnology giant and creator pesticides and herbicides, Dow AgroSciences is bringing forth brand new GMO soybeans and GMO corn to the market that will ultimately cause more herbicides than ever to be sprayed across the nation. What’s more, the USDA is all over the idea.

2,4-D Herbicide and Super GMO Crops

And perhaps even more startling than the drastic increase in herbicide usage is the fact that Dow AgroSciences’ new genetically modified soy is actually specifically designed to resist an especially toxic herbicide known as 2,4-D, a toxic compound used in the well-known Vitetnam War defoliant Agent Orange. Known to kill or maim at least 400,000 and cause an additional 500,000 birth defects according to conservative Viatnamese estimates, Agent Orange is one of the deadliest concoctions on record.

As of now, biotech giant Monsanto still has a tight grasp on the corn and soybean market, with approximately 90 percent of soy and 70 percent of corn engineered to drown in Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide Roundup. However, it seems that their control over this market may soon dwindle at rapid speeds, as Roundup is creating a whole new category of superweeds that are resistant to Roundup and the active ingredient in Roundup - glyphosate. These resistant weeds were expected by experts to cover at least 120 million hectares worldwide by 2010.

The solution up until now has been to simply spray more Roundup, but now Dow AgroSciences has come up with a new ‘solution’. Dow is creating new corn and soybean super-corps that are not only resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup, but will also be able to withstand large amounts of the company’s aforementioned ‘agent orange’ herbicide, 2,4-D. This way, farmers will be able to apply both herbicides to their fields, with the super toxic 2,4-D killing what Roundup cannot.

That’s right, instead of turning to sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming practices to combat super ‘mutant’ bugs and mega-weeds, the biotech industry is making even stronger and more dangerous super herbicides and toxic recipes.

What Dow is very happy about (while disregarding public health) is that the USDA has shown interest in deregulating both products, with the most recent signaled approval being in early July for the GE soybeans. In fact, the USDA put out a key a document in the regulatory process for GMOs known as the Plant Pest Risk Assessment. Not surprisingly, the USDA’s assessment of Dow’s soy ended with “highly unlikely to pose a plant pest risk.”

So what will be the outcome of all of this? Millions of farmland acreage to be drenched in more herbicides by the millions of pounds. Unfortunately, the claim to safety for the new GE products don’t mean much, as both herbicides and GMOs are consistently shown to cause some form of damage, whether that damage be to the environment, human and animal health, or the biosphere as a whole. Dow’s 2,4-D herbicide, like glyphosate found in Monsanto’s Roundup, is already present in drinking water supplies, so individuals everywhere are already consuming the chemical. But now, exposure to this herbicide is more than likely to exponentially increase, only to cause more complications.

Caltech Finds Link Between Immune Irregularities and Autism

Science Blog

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) pioneered the study of the link between irregularities in the immune system and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism a decade ago. Since then, studies of postmortem brains and of individuals with autism, as well as epidemiological studies, have supported the correlation between alterations in the immune system and autism spectrum disorder.

What has remained unanswered, however, is whether the immune changes play a causative role in the development of the disease or are merely a side effect. Now a new Caltech study suggests that specific changes in an overactive immune system can indeed contribute to autism-like behaviors in mice, and that in some cases, this activation can be related to what a developing fetus experiences in the womb.

The results appear in a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We have long suspected that the immune system plays a role in the development of autism spectrum disorder,” says Paul Patterson, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at Caltech, who led the work. “In our studies of a mouse model based on an environmental risk factor for autism, we find that the immune system of the mother is a key factor in the eventual abnormal behaviors in the offspring.”

The first step in the work was establishing a mouse model that tied the autism-related behaviors together with immune changes. Several large epidemiological studies—including one that involved tracking the medical history of every person born in Denmark between 1980 and 2005—have found a correlation between viral infection during the first trimester of a mother’s pregnancy and a higher risk for autism spectrum disorder in her child. To model this in mice, the researchers injected pregnant mothers with a viral mimic that triggered the same type of immune response a viral infection would.

“In mice, this single insult to the mother translates into autism-related behavioral abnormalities and neuropathologies in the offspring,” says Elaine Hsiao, a graduate student in Patterson’s lab and lead author of the PNAS paper.

The team found that the offspring exhibit the core behavioral symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorder—repetitive or stereotyped behaviors, decreased social interactions, and impaired communication. In mice, this translates to such behaviors as compulsively burying marbles placed in their cage, excessively self grooming, choosing to spend time alone or with a toy rather than interacting with a new mouse, or vocalizing ultrasonically less often or in an altered way compared to typical mice.

Next, the researchers characterized the immune system of the offspring of mothers that had been infected and found that the offspring display a number of immune changes. Some of those changes parallel those seen in people with autism, including decreased levels of regulatory T cells, which play a key role in suppressing the immune response. Taken together, the observed immune alterations add up to an immune system in overdrive—one that promotes inflammation.

“Remarkably, we saw these immune abnormalities in both young and adult offspring of immune-activated mothers,” Hsiao says. “This tells us that a prenatal challenge can result in long-term consequences for health and development.”

With the mouse model established, the group was then able to test whether the offspring’s immune problems contribute to their autism-related behaviors. In the most revealing test of this hypothesis, the researchers were able to correct many of the autism-like behaviors in the offspring of immune-activated mothers by giving the offspring a bone-marrow transplant from typical mice. The normal stem cells in the transplanted bone marrow not only replenished the immune system of the host animals but altered their autism-like behavioral impairments.

The researchers emphasize that because the work was conducted in mice, the results cannot be readily extrapolated to humans, and they certainly do not suggest that bone-marrow transplants should be considered as a treatment for autism. They also have yet to establish whether it was the infusion of stem cells or the bone-marrow transplant procedure itself—complete with irradiation—that corrected the behaviors.

However, Patterson says, the results do suggest that immune irregularities in children could be an important target for innovative immune manipulations in addressing the behaviors associated with autism spectrum disorder. By correcting these immune problems, he says, it might be possible to ameliorate some of the classic developmental delays seen in autism. In future studies, the researchers plan to examine the effects of highly targeted anti-inflammatory treatments on mice that display autism-related behaviors and immune changes. They are also interested in considering the gastrointestinal (GI) bacteria, or microbiota, of such mice. Coauthor Sarkis Mazmanian, a professor of biology at Caltech, has shown that gut bacteria are intimately tied to the function of the immune system. He and Patterson are investigating whether changes to the microbiota of these mice might also influence their autism-related behaviors.

Along with Patterson, Hsiao, and Mazmanian, additional Caltech coauthors on the PNAS paper, “Modeling an autism risk factor in mice leads to permanent immune dysregulation,” are Mazmanian lab manager Sara McBride and former graduate student Janet Chow. The work was supported by an Autism Speaks Weatherstone Fellowship, National Institutes of Health Graduate Training Grants, a Weston Havens Foundation grant, a Gregory O. and Jennifer W. Johnson Caltech Innovation Fellowship, a Caltech Innovation grant, and a Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program Idea Development Award.