Good Day Sunshine

For as long as I can recall, at least two or three decades, I have been teaching people to take a 20 minute walk at noon, even on cloudy days, to get sun exposure to help maintain vitamin D levels.

Now you know that the "new guidance", like most health discoveries, is actually old data in a new wrapper.

This just happens to be one of the benefits of following a skilled and experienced health care practitioner and educator instead of a glossy on-line tabloid.  Here you get facts.

Sunshine and Vitamin D

You can use our search function to read the many other articles we have posted on vitamin D and sunshine.

 

 

New guidance on vitamin D recommends midday sunshine

By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News

 

New health advice recommends short spells in the sun - without suncream and in the middle of the day.

Seven organisations have issued joint advice on vitamin D, which the body gets from natural sunlight.
The nutrient keeps bones strong, and protects against conditions like osteoporosis.
The guidance was drawn up because it is thought fears about skin cancer have made people too cautious about being in the sun.
Cancer Research UK and the National Osteoporosis Society are among the bodies which agree that "little and frequent" spells in summer sunshine several times a week can benefit your health.
The experts now say it is fine to go outside in strong sun in the middle of the day, as long as you cover up or apply sunscreen before your skin goes red.
'Too negative'

A good diet and sensible sun exposure will be adequate for most people to minimise their cancer risk.” Professor Peter Johnson Cancer Research UK

Professor Rona Mackie, from the British Association of Dermatologists, said: "Total sun protection with high factor suncream on all the time is not ideal, in terms of vitamin D levels.

"Even Australia has changed its policy on this. They're now producing charts showing parts of Australia where sun protection may not be required during some parts of the year.
"Some of the messages about sun exposure have been too negative. UK summer sunshine isn't desperately strong. We don't have many days in the year when it is very intense.
"What's changed is that we're now saying that exposure of 10 to 15 minutes to the UK summer sun, without suncream, several times a week is probably a safe balance between adequate vitamin D levels and any risk of skin cancer."
Official government advice already recommends vitamin D supplements for pregnant women and children aged under five.
But the experts who wrote the joint statement say mothers often are not made aware of this recommendation. They suggest women consult their GP.
Winter levels of vitamin D can be helped by a break in the tropical sun - or by eating oily fish, liver and fortified margarine.
'Complex area' Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, Professor Peter Johnson, said: "A good diet and sensible sun exposure will be adequate for the great majority of the UK population to minimise their cancer risk.
"The area of vitamin D and cancer is complex.
"There's some evidence, which is strongest in bowel cancer, that low levels of vitamin D in the blood correlate with the risk of developing cancer.
"But that doesn't mean those low levels cause bowel cancer.
"We think overall that low levels of vitamin D are unlikely to be major contributors to the chances of developing cancer in the UK population."
The joint statement also highlighted questions about vitamin D that warrant further research.
These include finding out the optimal levels of vitamin D, and more detail about the role of dietary sources and supplements.

S510 Update: Dead for Now

BREAKING NEWS - THE FOOD SAFETY BILL DIES WITH THE SPENDING BILL

           The Senate was taking up the House Omnibus Spending bill for 2011 (H.R.3082); but because the Republicans were insisting that the Senate clerks read the entire 1,924-page, $1.4 trillion spending bill paragraph by paragraph – which would have taken 50 hours to read out loud – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has just decided late today to yank the bill (including S.510 within it).  In its place, the Senate may actually adopt Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) idea of passing a one-page spending bill as a temporary, two-month stop-gap.
           However, it is too early to celebrate, so keep the pressure on to make sure that S.510, the so-called Food Safety bill, is not included in any substitute spending bill.  The Congressional leadership is working on a Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the Federal government at this year's level.  However, even though S.510 is also dead as amendment to the Omnibus bill, it is not yet known whether it will be added to the to-be-completed CR.
           Keep in mind that this will have to be passed by the House of Representatives as well.  So, process wise, it could well be a round of "ping-pong" with the CR.  The clock is ticking as this “lame duck” session comes to an end and still has many matters yet to deal with.
           So, while we know that S.510 has been withdrawn along with the Omnibus bill, it is not clear if it is completely dead.  Our NHF lobbyist’s instinct says that it is dead for this Congress.  Let’s hope he is correct.
           Stay alert and stay tuned to new developments.  S.510 may yet stay dead in its fresh grave, a death it fully deserves.

SOURCE

Drug Death, the FDA, and You

UPDATE: 13 June - Doctor, Hold Those Drugs

(Reuters Health) - U.S. doctors are too quick to reach for their prescription pads, according to a new report urging them to think more about side effects and non-drug alternatives.

"Instead of the latest and greatest, we want fewer and more time-tested drugs," said Dr. Gordon Schiff, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a non-profit organization that studies ways to improve safe practices in healthcare.

"We are really trying to promote a different way of thinking about practicing," added Schiff, whose report appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Nearly half of all Americans have used at least one prescription drug in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and experts say overprescribing is rampant.

By definition, that means people are being exposed to side effects, sometimes fatal, without the benefits that would justify those risks.

"Often what is really bothering them is not cured with a pill, but rather through exercise, physical therapy, or diet changes," Schiff told Reuters Health.

Yet many doctors are quick to prescribe a drug, partly because they have limited time to deal with individual patients or because they and their patients have been bombarded with ads from the pharmaceutical industry.

As for prevention and non-drug alternatives, Schiff said, "there are no drug reps coming to my office pushing that."

In an editorial in the same journal, researchers describe how opioid painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet have become increasingly common without good evidence that they help patients in the long run.

The evidence of harm, on the other hand, is clear, write Dr. Deborah Grady of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues.

In 2007 alone, for instance, there were nearly 11,500 deaths related to prescription opioids -- "a number greater than that of the combination of deaths from heroin and cocaine," according to the researchers.

Some four million prescriptions for long-acting opioids are written every year, with side effects ranging from addiction to constipation to sleepiness.

To counter some of this overprescribing, Schiff and colleagues urge doctors to think beyond drugs and to prescribe new ones much more cautiously.

When it first hits the market, new medicine has usually only been tested in a few thousand patients, often healthier and younger than the ones doctors see in their offices.

That leaves a lot of questions about safety, especially since patients often are taking several drugs at the same time. More than a third of people over 60 take five or more drugs, for instance, and the number of prescriptions continues to rise.

But Dr. Lisa Schwartz and her husband Dr. Steven Woloshin, both of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, told Reuters Health it's difficult for doctors to get unbiased information about new drugs.

"We need to be making this information much more easily accessible to doctors," said Schwartz, an expert in risk communication. "There are billions of dollars being spent on new drugs with unproven benefits."

Schwartz and Woloshin said one way to do this would be to have the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration, which approves new drugs, send out simple summaries about the medications.

They also emphasized that overprescribing, while real, goes hand in hand with underprescribing of drugs to high-risk patients.

"We have both problems in this country," Schwartz told Reuters Health.

According to Schiff, patients also have a role to play.

"Patients need to ask critical and skeptical questions, too," he said. "They really should learn about the side effects of the drugs they are taking and be on the lookout for them."

Schiff's "Principles of Conservative Prescribing" study was funded by government grants supporting consumer healthcare education and healthcare quality research.

SOURCE: bit.ly/lwuNm0 Archives of Internal Medicine, June 13, 2011.

UPDATE:  Since most of the major pharmaceutical companies are global, it may be that FDA is overlooking offshore study problems in their FastTrack pay-for-approval process Foreign Drug Trials: A Challenge to FDA 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Rense and Jonathan Emord  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNuYSqK7pVU06/13/11

12/16/10 In his important interview with George Noory, Washington attorney Jonathan Emord talked about the approximately 300,000 deaths annually from FDA approved and properly prescribed drugs.

Noory's web site states the issues of "conflict of interests found within the FDA and their history with hiding the negative aspects of prescription drugs as well as the benefits of natural remedies. Additionally, he also talked about his research into unmanned military technology. "The agency is a captive of the drug industry, unfortunately," Emord lamented about the FDA, "that has caused it to be a broken agency. It approves unsafe drugs, knowingly." To illustrate his point, he detailed the saga of the drug Avandia, where reviewers inside the FDA repeatedly warned of dangerous side effects but were continually dismissed by their superiors. He cited one reviewer who was told by his superior in the agency that the FDA "had to maintain good relations with the drug companies because they are our customers."
Emord asserted that 15 to 20% of prescription drugs on the market today are "so obviously unsafe as to warrant their removal from the market." He explained that these are newer drugs, aggressively pushed into the marketplace by pharmaceutical companies in order to replace older and safer drugs whose patents had expired. According to Emord, the effect of this dangerous favoring of profit over safety has resulted in "over 290,000 deaths a year from the proper use of drugs prescribed by doctors." Compounding the problem, he said, the FDA is so beholden to the pharmaceutical industry that it also aggressively "forbids any statement that a nutrient treats a disease" whether there is proof or not. The simple reason for this, he said, is because if people started using nutrients to improve their wellness, then they would no longer need to turn to the drugs sold by pharmaceutical companies."

Now today, to further the discussion the FDA calls out more problematic supplements because "These tainted products can cause serious adverse effects, including strokes, organ failure, and death," said FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. "The manufacturers selling these tainted products are operating outside the law."

Of course I have yet to hear Hamburg make the same statements about and pharmaceutical drug that we know causes "serious adverse effects, ...strokes, organ failure, and death."  I'm sure you have not heard this either.

And now today, the Alliance for Human Research Protection sends this gem based on a report from PLoS

If you aren't telling your representatives and senators to stop the PhRMA payola, you should consider it now, after reading this important information.

31 Prescription Drugs Linked to 387 Homicides

Wednesday, 15 December 2010
"Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others, " identifies 31 drugs linked to 1,527 acts of violence... After two decades of contentious denials about the suicidal risk posed by certain psychoactive prescription drugs, numerous drugs now carry label warnings about suicidal behavior. Now, a new study in PLoS One , identifies 31 drugs in FDA's MedWatch adverse drug reports that are disproportionately linked to 1,527 acts of violence--defined as "Homicide," "Physical assault," "Physical abuse," "Homicidal ideation" or "Violence-related symptom." The violence events in these widely prescribed drugs--for diverse patient populations--were reported to the FDA between 2004 and Sept. 2009. The authors, Thomas J. Moore, Joseph Glenmullen, MD Curt D. Furberg, MD, identified 1,937 reports of violence submitted to FDA's MedWatch that met a restrictive criteria: The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms. The patients were 41% female and 59% male with a mean age of 36 years (SD=17.9) Of all currently marketed prescription drugs, those linked to most of the violent events reported to the FDA are drugs that increase dopamine and /or serotonin in the brain-- irrespective of the patient population. The worst offender with the strongest association to uncontrollable, murderous violence--within days of ingesting the drug--is the smoking cessation drug, Chantix (varenicline), which increases dopamine: it ranks 18.0 in the proportional reporting ratio (PRR) with 408 cases of violence--including murder.  There are two other smoking cessation drugs that do NOT pose serious risks of violence. The next drugs most often linked to unprovoked violent outbursts--some resulting in murder--are 11 of 13 SSRI antidepressants. These not so, "magic bullets," whose mode of action (reuptake inhibition) increases serotonin, were involved in 578 cases of violence. Two drugs within the SSRI class--Prozac and Paxil--have been linked to the greatest number of reported cases of violence toward others: Prozac ranks 10.9 in the PRR, with 72 reported cases of violence, and Paxil (Paroxetine) ranks 10.2 in PRR, with 177 reported cases of violence. The authors note that there was no signal for violence linked to mood stabilizers such as valproic acid, carbamazepine, and phenytoin, even though these drugs are commonly used in bipolar patients who may experience psychosis in the acute manic phase and therefore be more prone to violence. On the other hand, SSRI's, which are clearly linked to violent actions in patients with no history of violent behavior, are being prescribed for patients with bipolar disorder. That is a prescription for disaster. The other class of drugs that are demonstrably linked to violence are 3 drugs prescribed for ADHD--amphetamines, atomoxetine and methylphenidate--and 5 hypnotic /sedatives. Only 0.25% of all serious adverse drug events met the PLoS study's restrictive criteria of violence. Thus, it is likely that the number of cases included in the analysis is understated. Not only does the FDA disregard the precautionary principle of medicine--"First, do no harm"-- the agency is unleashing drugs whose mode of action--accelerating dopamine and or serotonin in the brain--poses serious threats of violence to bystanders in the community!  Think of the school shootings....the postal shootings...the troop "friendly fire" deaths... Read the complete article at PLoS One , "an interactive, open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research,"

"For the triumph of evil it is only necessary for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke

In some earlier discussions, FDA hero Dr. David Graham points out more problems with "approved" pharmaceuticals and the danger they pose for your health if you are using them.

Read these two informative articles, Are These Dangerous Drugs in Your Medicine Chest?  and Revealing "Fraud Magazine" Interview with Dr. David Graham

Selections from Natural Health News 

Here's What's Up

Jul 31, 2007

The people's hero, David Graham, MD, a drug safety officer at the FDA, called for Avandia's withdrawal. Dr. Graham estimated that its toxic effects on the heart had caused as many as 205000 heart attacks, strokes and death from 1999 to ...

Protecting the Bottom Line at Your Expense

Mar 02, 2005

David J. Graham, associate director of the Office of Drug Safety, testified about the toxicity of Vioxx and several other drugs before a Senate panel. He suggested that Bextra, Crestor (the cholesterol-lowering drug), Accutane (acne), ...

Avandia: Is it time to pull it off the market?

Jul 11, 2010

UPDATE: 15 July - FDA reviewer David Graham told the panel Avandia's risks were real enough "to put you in a hospital or a cemetery." Graham, who wants the pill banned, recently published an analysis estimating that as many as 100000

Remember Dr. Graham?

Aug 20, 2006

David Graham. Dr. Graham is the associate science director of the FDA's Office of Drug Safety and for several years now he's been an outspoken critic of the drug approval process at the FDA. In 2004, Dr. Graham testified before a Senate ...

Keep Safety In Mind with CFL Bulbs

December 2010 -  Of the numerous posts we have on Natural Health News about the risk and hazard of CFL light bulbs I chose to update this one to let you know that it has been agreed to reduce mercury levels in these toxic light bulbs.

What you aren't being told is that you can still get the regular, old-fashioned type light bulbs that have been improved to give you more light, for longer hours, and with better efficiency.

LED lights are improving, are now available in more formats, and cost is coming down.

We still vote for LED.


December 2007 - In Parliament (UK) a recent discussion was brought up in regard to the much advertised CFL light bulbs. What is never mentioned in all the advertising and promotion of these bulbs as a means to save energy is that they are a hazardous waste.

You might think it amusing to worry about disposal of these light bulbs, but you should think otherwise: CFL bulbs contain approximately 6 grams of mercury.


Parliament suggest 10 steps when removing and disposing of these bulbs including: Wearing a protective mask & gloves; placing the bulb in a sealed study box using tape; placing a damp cloth in the box, and taking the sealed box to a toxic waste disposal site.

Toxic mercury can be very harmful to health and may lead to development of neurological diseases.

You might want to look into LED or halogen bulbs as an option.