NEARLY $$$1 BILLION FOR WHAT?

When, in 1980, Susan G. Komen died, it was already eight years after we were told there would be a cure for breast cancer.

Now in 2007 the statistics really aren't all that much better, and the Race for the Cure is just that, a race.

There is no cure, although there really is a cure.

The problem is that mainstream medicine and Big Pharma doesn't really want you to know. I wonder if the 200 employees at Komen Foundation want you to know either.

Gee, aren't they proud of their statistics that at least 74 percent of women over 40 get mammograms annually.

Ever hear, as you would in the Women's Health programs I've been teaching for many years more than a decade, that mammograms are a major cause of cancer?

And did you know that you don't have to lose your hair from chemo or that it is about 2% effective; that tamoxifen raises your risk of the more deadly ovarian cancer or that radiation causes thyroid dysfunction and heart failure.

Not from the Komen Foundation that's for sure.

General Mills won't support Creating Health Institute's Women's Health programs (especially those we provide to people with limited income) through the pink lids program. Komen never responds when we submit a proposal.

We've got much more to tell you. We could do this and a lot more with a small fraction of a billion.

PS - did you know that soy is a promoter of cancer and yeast infection? you would if you visit www.leaflady.org and our BLOG natural health news.

Aspartame and Statins may now share the same toxicity issues

STATINS: The 'safe' drug that may cause Parkinson's disease

Everyone seems to be popping a cholesterol- lowering statin drug these days. They have become part of the daily health regime for millions of people, and they are considered to be so safe that one statin - simvastatin - is available over-the-counter in the UK without a prescription.

They're not safe, of course, and a new study that links statins to Parkinson's, the disease of the central nervous system, underlines the point.

Statins reduce levels of the 'bad' LDL cholesterol - and the new study, from the University of North Carolina, believes these lowered levels may trigger Parkinson's. Sufferers can have levels of LDL cholesterol that are three times below the average.

Researchers are so concerned by their discovery that they are initiating an immediate and major study involving 16,000 participants.

This is not exactly the first piece of bad news about the 'safe' statins. One statin, Baycol, was withdrawn from the market in 2001 after 31 people died from rhabdomyolysis, a muscle-weakening disease caused by the drug. At the time, 601 further cases of rhadomyolysis and 38 deaths among statin users had been reported to America's drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration.

Other reported side effects include heart failure,liver and kidney damage, myalgia, insomnia and sinusitis.

None of this will stop the statin rollercoaster. They are among the most popular drugs in the world, topping annual sales of $20bn, thanks in part to the creative prescribing flair of doctors, who are also dishing them out to patients with osteoporosis and Alzheimer's.

Source: Movement Disorders, published on-line on December 18, 2006.

ALRI Lean Dreams

I have to give this product a thumbs up. Sometimes I have problems falling asleep; I just lay in bed but cannot fall asleep. I have tried many other sleep aids with limited success. Some even give me that hangover feeling in the morning. I tried 2 caps of ALRI Lean Dreams before bed last night, and I started to feel it within an hour. I had no problems falling asleep once I got into bed! This is a great product if it continues to work this well. Oh yeah, and the caps… they smell like candy!

Intravenous vitamin C as a cancer treatment: Proof of Effectiveness is Already In.

Boy this makes me angry when I read such inaccurate reporting. Intravenous vitamin C therapy for cancer has been around for a very long time. If you know how to do research you'd find the science behind the treatment and know it has been tested and approved as effective. The down site is that the money machines behind the FDA want everyone to think this treatment is quackery.

It does a great job for Hepatitis C too.

Too bad for so many people who have been denied this treatment by ignorant medical professionals these past few decades. Too bad also that the brave physicians who have carried on this therapy have risked losing their licenses so they could prescribe the best therapy for their patients.

There is an entire medical association that focuses on these treatments, the Oxidative Medical Association. ACAM member doctors also offer this treatment.

We can even tell you how to do a home version, at about half the strength of the IV therapy.

The PetSmart fellows (see next article) would have been helped early on with IV vitamin C, but no one told them!

FDA OKs trial on vitamin C for cancer Cancer Treatment Centers runs research
Bruce Japsen, Published January 11, 2007

Adding more credibility to its research into alternative methods for oncologic medical care, Cancer Treatment Centers of America said it has won federal approval to begin a clinical trial studying the potential of intravenous vitamin C as a cancer
treatment.

While winning U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to begin clinical trials is a regular occurrence for traditional cancer researchers such as the nation's elite comprehensive cancer centers designated by the National Cancer Institute, Zion-based Cancer Treatment Centers is not known for conducting federally approved research--making the FDA-approved vitamin C trial a bit of a coup for the firm.

"Our vitamin C research protocol is the first investigator-initiated protocol approved by the FDA in the history of CTCA," said Christopher Lis, the firm's vice president of research and development. "We are now taking our research here to the next level."

Lis said there will be a limited number of patients who will actually receive the therapy. "Only patients who have exhausted all other conventional treatment options are eligible to receive the therapy," Lis added.

The first phase of the trial is to examine the "optimal therapeutic dose in a series of 18 patients" and largely see whether the treatment is safe and tolerable to patients. Additional studies will be needed that could take several years to show whether it is effective and could lead to FDA-approved treatment.

The FDA confirmed Cancer Treatment Centers' "investigational" new drug application but would not comment further.

Potential medical uses of vitamin C gained notoriety in the 1970s because of the efforts of researchers such as Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. But such research was not known to reveal successes or was not pursued long enough to result in standardized effective cancer treatments, say researchers such as Jeffrey Blumberg, professor of nutrition at Tufts University in Boston. In older studies the vitamin was taken orally.

Although early studies, conducted with orally dosed supplements, failed to demonstrate clinical benefit to cancer patients, hope still persists that vitamin C
may be useful if administered correctly.

"I am not aware of anybody else now that is doing IV studies in patients with vitamin C to look at cancer effects," Blumberg said.

While cautioning that the research is early, Blumberg said vitamin C therapy could result in reducing side effects of chemotherapy or as a potential booster to
existing treatments. He cautioned that it is too early to know.

"If this works, we would have a useful adjunct to chemotherapy treatment that could lower the dose," Blumberg said.

Cancer Treatment Centers' facilities differ from most cancer care centers in that they provide traditional inpatient and outpatient chemotherapy and surgical care as well as non-traditional services such as acupuncture, massage and nutrition therapies.

The privately held for-profit company has hospitals in Zion, Philadelphia and Tulsa, Okla.
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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Sorry you missed this help

Michael Manson and Jim Dougherty from PetSmart missed out on ten years of pain free life because they did not enter our trials held in Everett WA in the early 1990s. The program developed by Creating Health Institute was medically monitored by an Everett area MD. To his amazement many of the patients were discharged from the CFS diagnosis.

Our program uses only natural treatment and no risk of unknonw factors assocaited with anti-viral pharmaceuticals and lack of long-term studies.

Nature heals!

Small trial stirs hope for chronic fatigue patients By Toni Clarke
Sun Jan 14, 6:30 PM ET

Shortly after hiking the Grand Canyon with his wife in 1988, Michael Manson, the co-founder of PetSmart Inc., came down with what felt like the flu. So did business partner Jim Dougherty. The illness changed their lives.

In both men, the flu-like symptoms triggered a more debilitating condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome for which there is no known cure, and no known cause. Its symptoms range from fatigue and vertigo to nausea, pain and cognitive confusion.

Many in the medical community don't believe chronic fatigue syndrome is a real disease. There is no diagnostic test for it. Patients are often referred to psychiatrists on the assumption that their symptoms are psychosomatic.

But for those who suffer its symptoms, including Manson and Dougherty, a former marine who served twice in Vietnam, the condition is all too devastatingly real.

"We've been fighting this for 18 years, and we've tried every possible treatment, from wing of bat to eye of newt," said Manson, who has spent months at a time too weak to walk more than a block or even get out of bed.

Nothing worked - until now.

Last June, Manson went to see Dr. Jose Montoya, associate professor of medicine at Stanford University and a specialist in infectious diseases who believes the disorder may be caused -- at least in some cases, by one or more viruses.

Montoya had presented anecdotal data earlier that year at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, which suggested an antiviral drug called Valcyte, made by Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG, could be helpful in treating certain CFS patients.

Montoya now has data on 25 CFS patients, nearly all of whom had high levels in their blood plasma of antibodies to the human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) and the Epstein-Barr virus.

The data -- presented recently at a conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida -- were remarkably consistent. Nearly every patient responded to the drug, Montoya said, and most of the responses were dramatic.

"Scientists have suspected viruses for years but have never been able to prove it," said Kristin Loomis, executive director of the HHV-6 Foundation, a non-profit group which funds research into HHV-6.

Last year Manson began a six-month course of Valcyte, which is approved to treat transplant patients to prevent viral infection. At first he felt worse. Then, after a few weeks, he began to improve. He started walking, every day a little more.

Now, nearly seven months later, he is walking two or three miles a day and working out with light weights. And he is working on new business ideas.

"Not only is my physical ability returning but my cognitive ability has come back too," Manson said.

Even so, Montoya stresses that the study is extremely small and the results may not be replicated in bigger trials, the first of which he hopes to start within the next few months.

"In a field that has been so stigmatized, and so full of false hopes, I think the patients and the field deserve the best kind of trial, keeping an open mind to the possibility that it won't work," he said.

Roche has agreed to put up $1.5 million to fund the next, 30-patient study

"Whether we put serious money behind this will all depend on the outcome of this next study," said Nigel Pluck, Roche's clinical science leader for Valcyte. "This is a somewhat contentious area for the medical profession in that CFS is not a disease that you can test for. It's a diagnosis that you come to by excluding everything else."

Even if results of further studies are positive they will probably apply only to those patients with active HHV-6 and Epstein-Barr viruses, as indirectly measured by the number of antibodies produced to fight them, Montoya said.

But for those who appear to fit the profile, like Manson, the benefits could be enormous.

"We are very excited and holding our breath," he said.

Crazy Food May Lead to Health Woes

The latest news for all you people that think the supermarket is filled with safe and healthy things to eat, think about this:

Kraft is the parent company for Breyer's ice cream. Breyer's is originally an old Philadelphia company that once made clean ice cream. The Breyer family was in the small circle of friends that I grew up in and my the owners of the icce cream plant where my brother had his first summer job, thanks to my father's phone call.

Now what Kraft has in the works for this food can be considered amazing!

The new 'double-churned' (to make it supposedly taste better to make you think it is healthy and low calorie) will be hiding some facts from the label.

You'll be getting genetically modified (GM) fish protein in your treat and won't know it.

I also wonder why GM fish additives needs to be in ice cream.

Now, what do you think about them apples?

Food Fortification

Ladies, perhaps you aren't aware that using birth control pills contributes to this problem.

ATLANTA, Jan. 5 -- Despite fortification of the food supply with folic acid, serum folate levels have dropped en masse among women in recent years, researchers said.

Median serum folate concentrations among women of childbearing age decreased 16% from 1999 -- the year after fortification started -- to 2004, said Sheree L. Boulet, Dr.P.H., of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, and colleagues.

Red blood cell folate concentrations also decreased 8% in the same period, they wrote in the Jan. 5 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a CDC publication.

Folic acid, the synthetic form of folate, is added to enriched cereal-grain products to help prevent neural tube birth defects (NTD) such as spinal bifida or anencephaly.

In an accompanying note, MMWR's editors suggested that the results do not reflect that folic acid fortification does not work. A previous study found that serum folate levels increased from a mean of 4.8 ng/mL before fortification during 1988 to 1994 to about 13.0 ng/mL in 1999 to 2000 after it started, with similar increases in red blood cell folate concentrations.

The editors suggested that the finding reflects other changes that have occurred in the American population.

"More likely explanations include 1) changes over time in the proportion of women taking supplements containing folic acid, 2) decreased consumption of foods rich in natural folates or foods fortified with folic acid (i.e., enriched cereal-grain products), 3) variations in the amounts of folic acid added to enriched grain products since fortification was mandated, and 4) increases in risk factors associated with lower folate concentrations such as obesity."

The researchers compared National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data for the periods 1999 to 2000, 2001 to 2002, and 2003 to 2004. Each included a nationally representative sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population. Members of these groups were individually interviewed and underwent a physical examination including blood sample collection.

They found that the median serum folate concentration among women ages 15 to 44 were:

* 12.6 ng/mL (95% confidence interval 11.7 to 13.5) in 1999 to 2000,
* 11.4 ng/mL (95% CI 11.1 to 12.0) in 2001 to 2002, and
* 10.6 ng/mL (95% CI 10.2 to 11.2) in 2003 to 2004.

Overall, this represented a significant decline (P<0.001).

The red blood cell folate concentrations likewise fell significantly (P=0.028). The findings were:

* 255 ng/mL (95% CI 240 to 270) in 1999 to 2000,
* 260 ng/mL (95% CI 250 to 272) in 2001 to 2002, and
* 235 ng/mL (95% CI 226 to 246) in 2003 to 2004.

While these levels are not below the 220 ng/mL recommended in the national health objective for the year 2010, the trend is heading that direction.

"Although non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans have met the Healthy People 2010 objective for median [red blood cell] folate concentration since 1999 to 2000," the editors wrote. "If folate intake continues to decrease overall, median concentrations might decrease to less than 220 ng/mL."

The researchers found that the serum folate trend was significantly downward for all three ethnic populations considered (P=0.008 for non-Hispanic whites, P=0.023 for non-Hispanic blacks, and P<0.001 for Mexican Americans).

Interestingly, the editors noted that the largest decreases were among non-Hispanic white women, a population with historically higher levels of folate intake who now accounted for most of the decreases in the overall study population.

Future studies should link these findings to data from the National Birth Defects Prevention Network to see if the declines in folate levels have affected neural tube birth defect prevalence, they added.

The CDC recommends that all women of childbearing age capable of becoming pregnant should consume 400 μg of folic acid daily. Since fortification is not expected to provide the full daily requirement, women should consume a diet containing folate-rich or -fortified foods as well as dietary supplements, according to the CDC.

No financial disclosure information was reported.
Primary source: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
Source reference:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "Folate Status in Women of Childbearing Age, by Race/Ethnicity -- United States, 1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004" MMWR 2006;55:1377-1380.

CytoSport CytoGainer

Taste: 9/10 - My first tub of CytoGainer was the Chocolate Mint flavor. I loved the taste of it. It tasted like a mint chocolate chip ice cream milkshake when it was mixed with milk. I began to get tired of the taste towards the end of the tub. This time I got Chocolate Malt. Although a little sweet -- it tastes excellent!

Mixability: 4/10 – Mixability was very bad. Seriously, I am getting very annoyed with it. This could be solved by using a blender, but then you have to wait for it to settle because it gets all bubbly. Shaking it does not work well, either.

Overall: 8/10 - All together I like this product. It is a pretty good weight gainer. It helped me maintain my weight after losing weight due to the flu.