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Healthy Living in a Toxic World

Drug Firms Fail to Conduct Post-Marketing Studies – (05-20-00)

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Drug Firms Fail to Conduct Post-Marketing Studies

Sometimes it seems that the government has less and less control over the pharmaceutical companies. This is a perfect example of the drug companies ignoring mandates from the FDA. Apr 17 (Reuters) – Most of the studies that federal health officials require drug companies to perform on new medicines after they hit the market are never done, a US consumer group charged on Thursday. Often when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves a drug, it orders the manufacturer to conduct further studies of side effects or how well it works for certain patients. But only 13% of the 88 follow-up studies required for drugs launched in the early 1990s were completed, according to a report by consumer group Public Citizen. No studies were finished for 107 drugs that went on the market between January 1995 and last December, the group said.

What’s On YOUR Food Label and is it Safe? 7 Reasons for Concern

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I’ll trust that you’re reading food labels.  Even better is to buy foods that don’t have labels. But can you trust the safety?

Of course you can.  After all, the FDA regulates things that food manufacturers put into the stuff we eat.  Many of the food additives that appear at the tail end of the ingredients label fall under the category of GRAS (generally recognized as safe).  They are used to preserve, thicken, flavor and blend the foods we stuff in our mouths.  Since the FDA determines was is recognized is safe, we’re all good and that would be the end of this blog post.  But, of course, they don’t and this isn’t.

Nope.  It’s the manufacturers who (A) determine whether something is recognized as safe and (B) let the FDA know about it.  Here’s how it works:

The food and beverages manufacturers hire scientists and / or companies to determine whether an additive is GRAS.  If it is, then the company is exempt from the pre-market approval process.  In other words, these scientists can rubber stamp a new food additive and the FDA doesn’t get involved.

The Food Additives Amendment of 1958 listed 700 food substances that were grandfathered in and bypassed the FDA pre-market approval process.  1997, under the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Food Regulations the FDA announced a program that would allow streamlining of food additives merely by notifying the FDA that experts generally agreed that a product was safe.  Incidentally, food colorings cannot be exempted.  It is estimated that about 1,000 food additives are in our food supply that the FDA has no knowledge of.

Thus began the fox watching the henhouse.

In this particular study, researchers looked at 451 GRAS notifications that were voluntarily submitted to the FDA between 1997 and 2012, specifically looking for conflicts of interest that may have been present.  Here’s what they found:

  1. 22.4% of the safety assessments were made by an employee of an additive manufacturer.
  2. 13.3% of the assessments were made by an employee of a consulting firm selected by the manufacturer (not an expert).
  3. 64.3% were done by an expert panel selected by either a consulting firm or the manufacturer.
  4. In none of the assessments was an expert panel selected by a third party (which would be the ideal situation–much like a UL listing).
  5. There were 290 panels  with an average of 3.5 members.  Ten members served on 27 or more panels; 1 served on 128 panels and at least 1 of these 10 with the most frequent service was a member of 225 panels (77.6%).

In other words, 100% of the members of these panels worked, either directly or indirectly, for the company that manufactured the food additive in question.  I’m not saying that there is definitely a problem here, but if I were you, I’m pretty sure I’d still to what I call my “8 year old rule.”

If a typical 8-year old can’t read the ingredients label, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.  Many of the food labels for processed foods today don’t pass the “35 year old biochemist” rule, let alone the 8 year old rule.

 

The tightening grip of big pharma – (05-10-01)

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The tightening grip of big pharma

This is a very important article to read for those of you living life with blinders on. The most disturbing news article appeared last Sunday in the AZ Republic as the front page story. The Valley of the Sun is experiencing a severe shortage of pharmacists. It was made out to be a serious situation. To me, the story was sickening to the effect that we as a population are not getting the message. Pharmaceuticals are dangerous. The drug companies control the research and many doctors are unwilling to report obvious side effects as what they are. You are a guinea pig each and every time you take a pharmaceutical drug. Remember that. And, please, read this commentary.

The Journal : Back Issues

Read entire article here

University accused of violating academic freedom to safeguard funding from drug companies – (09-17-01)

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University accused of violating academic freedom to safeguard funding from drug companies

This is really a sad commentary on how much of an influence money has on the playing field. This also puts a taint on all academy-derived research, no matter whether this is an isolated event or widespread.

bmj.com Dyer 323 (7313): 591a

Read entire article here

Is that study really necessary? – (09-06-01)

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Is that study really necessary?

This is an topic that I joke about on occasion. There are things that those of us in the natural field have been talking about for years (avoiding refined carbs, increase fruits and veggies…) that come out in research studies and come to incredibly obvious solutions. Personally, I feel that the money spent on these studies would be better off spent on other, less obvious conclusions. This is a nice commentary on this topic.

Read entire article here

Chicken With a Side of Arsenic: 4 Reasons to Go Organic

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We can no longer hide behind the shield of ignorance.  The foods we are eating are killing us.  Slowly.

Orthorexia nervosa is the term used by some psychologists to refer to those of us who go out of our way to live healthy, unprocessed and organic.  While the Latin origins of the word “orthorexia” mean “correct diet,” the lifestyle associated with this has someone now become an actual psychological diagnosis (although not recognized in the new DSM-V).

One could argue that, 10,000 years ago, everyone would have fit the diagnosis.  It is the way we were MEANT to live.  But society has become so accepting of toxic foodstuff and exposures that anyone who does not accept them to some degree is pathologic.

Go figure.

For those of you not eating organic animal products, it’s time for a wake up call.  They should be avoided as much as possible.  There are already a variety of reasons that I have covered in previous blog post that can be read by clicking here.

Before we get to this article, we need to cover a short primer on the heavy metal arsenic.  Without going into too much detail, the mathmatical equation “arsenic = bad” should pretty much sum it up.  Kidney damage, cancer and death (arguably the worst of the 3…) are well known side effects, just to name a few.  Typical exposures are usually through water. but food can be a source as well.

Arsenic containing compounds are used often in the chicken industry (a compound called Roxarsone) to make the chickens grow faster.  Sounds like a great idea to me.  It’s a surprise the bodybuilding community hasn’t picked up on this fantastic idea themselves.  So what if it’s extremely toxic if it’ll help you get bigger faster??

But seriously, though…who EVER thought adding a toxic, carcinogenic (so carcinogenic that even the American Cancer Society agrees that it causes cancer) compound to our food supply?  Luckily as we’ll see from this particular study, organic chicken is a safer choice:

  1. Arsenic levels were TRIPLE the amount in conventional versus organic and antibiotic-free chicken (the organic was only slightly better).
  2. Roxarsone was detected in 20 of 40 conventional samples, 1 of 13 antibiotic-free samples, and none of the 25 organic samples.
  3. Researchers estimated that consumers of conventional chicken would ingest an additional 0.11 µg/day of arsenic compared with consumers of organic chicken.
  4. This increase in arsenic exposure could result in 3.7 additional lifetime bladder and lung cancer cases per 100,000 exposed persons.

While these numbers aren’t very large (3.7 cases out of 100,000 people), it is yet another piece of the puzzle of human chronic disease.  While you may think that this is hard to balance out against the high cost of organic chicken (Costco sells it for about $6/lb), it gets balanced out by smaller serving sizes, which you should be doing anyway.   A plant based lifestyle can still include chicken and beef, but only the higher quality variety.