Dr. Westman: Yet Another Possible Explanation (about the Masai’s high fat diet)

Source: Regina Wilshire, Weight of the Evidence.

After reading the findings comparing the Masai, and the rural and urban Bantu in Tanzania, Dr. Eric Westman penned a reply to the British Journal of Sports Medicine:

Yet another possible explanation
Eric C Westman, researcher Duke University

Thank you for this contemporary assessment of dietary intake among the Masai pastoralists. Through the paradigm-shifting lens of a recent comprehensive summary of the lack of science to implicate saturated fat as a cause for heart disease [1], and new studies which suggest carbohydrate to be more worrisome than saturated fat for atherogenesis [2-4], there is a simple explanation for why the Masai do not develop atherosclerosis despite consuming a high-fat diet that the authors did not consider: high-fat diets (not containing man-made fats) are not atherogenic.

1. Taubes G. Good Calories, Bad Calories. Knopf Publishing, 2007.
2. Krauss RM et al. Separate effects of reduced carbohydrate intake and weight loss on atherogenic dyslipidemia. Am J Clin Nutr 2006;83:1025-31.
3. Mozaffarian D et al. Dietary fats, carbohydrate, and progression of coronary atherosclerosis in postmenopausal women. Am J Clin Nutr 2004;60:1102-3.
4.Volek JS et al. Dietary carbohydrate restriction induces a unique metabolic state positively affecting atherogenic dyslipidemia, fatty acid partitioning, and metabolic syndrome. Prog Lipid Res 2008;Mar 15 (Epub ahead of print]

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker

Source: Nicholas von Hoffman, TruthDig.

You may be surprised to learn that the pleasant person from FedEx Ground delivering your package owns the truck which he or she has parked in front of your house. FedEx Ground drivers, you will find out in Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, are not FedEx employees.

They are what are called independent contractors, although it demands no little effort to discern what about their position is independent. If they do not do what they are told, their contracts are abrogated forthwith. They are required to buy their own truck with 60 monthly installments of $781.12, which comes to $46,867.20. Plus there is a final kicker payment of $8,000, all of which adds up to a grand total of almost $55,000. On top of this, as an independent business person, the driver must bear the costs of insurance, maintenance, fuel, repairs and the fee for the FedEx uniform rental.

FedEx Ground drivers who want to take vacations must hire their own replacements to cover the routes while they are gone. If a FedEx Ground independent contractor can afford it, he should take a vacation because the hours are long, the work is hard and the compensation is less than princely. A driver will take home between $25,000 and $35,000 a year.

One of the strengths of Greenhouse’s book is that it puts the meat of specificity on the bones of labor statistics. The Big Squeeze is salted with interviews and biographies of people in dozens of occupations. It is instructive to read the statistics concerning highly trained people losing their jobs to people in low-wage countries, but the numbers take on painful significance when you are introduced to an electrical engineer named Myra Bronstein, working for Watchmark, a Bellevue, Wash., firm which develops software used by cell phone companies.

One day Bronstein and 17 of her colleagues got an e-mail asking them to report to Watchmark’s boardroom the following morning. As Myra and the other quality assurance engineers gathered in the boardroom, the director of human resources began giving out large manila envelopes. Once everyone was there, Myra recalled, “The head of HR said, ‘Unfortunately, we’re having layoffs, and you’re in the room because you’re being impacted by the layoffs.’” The 18 engineers were dumbstruck, but the head of human resources pressed on. “‘Your replacements,’” she continued, ” ‘are flying in from India, and you’re expected to train them if you are going to receive severance.’”

Drawing back the camera on employment conditions, Greenhouse writes that “Forrester Research estimates that 3.4 million white-collar jobs – some 260,000 a year – will be sent overseas between 2003 and 2050. Forrester forecasts that this exodus will include 1.6 million office-support jobs, 542,000 computer jobs, 259,000 management jobs, 191,000 architecture jobs, 79,000 legal jobs, and 30,000 art and design jobs.”

The author explains that these numbers are a small fraction of total employment in their respective fields, but the percentage of jobs held by college-trained white-collar workers in fields such as insurance, pharmacology, banking and information technology which can be shipped abroad in some instances ranges above 40 percent.

A few years ago many an American entertained the conceit that the natural world division of labor, á la Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would have the little brown and yellow people doing the heavy lifting jobs in ill-ventilated factories reeking of lead vapors, while large, highly intelligent, highly white citizens of the United States would enjoy a life of brain work and ease. It has not worked out that way, as Greenhouse shows his readers. Whether or not one’s job is actually sent abroad, the mere fact that it can be works not only to place a limit on what you can expect to be paid but depresses wages and salaries.

Gone overseas, besides jobs, is the capability of generating jobs. Technology, the industrial knowledge base and the necessary organizational skills to use these efficiently are also being exported. This puts additional downward pressure on compensation here at home and makes its contribution to Greenhouse’s doleful overall narrative of what has been happening to perhaps four-fifths of our working population for the last 30 years or so.

The writer’s central thesis is, “One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers – white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers – that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plain than in decades past, with health coverage, pension benefits, job security, workloads, stress levels, and often wages growing worse for millions of workers.”

Greenhouse’s main argument is so at variance with what we are told every day about the superiority of American everything, it makes you blink. We judge ourselves by what our politicians and our television sets say, which is that we are the best, most blessed and richest of people and getting more so. A rising tide floats all boats, President John Kennedy said, and the American tide keeps on rising, but Greenhouse shows that tens of millions of boats are either staying put or sinking.

A day seldom passes but a member of Congress takes the floor to remind us in mawkish tremolo that the hundreds of thousands of people trying to get into the U.S. are proof positive of the power of the American dream. If Greenhouse is right, and there is no reason to believe he is not, that American dream is just that – a dream.

“Northwest Airlines,” Greenhouse writes, apropos of some people’s dreams, “gave laid-off workers a booklet entitled ‘101 Ways to Save Money.’ But the booklet added insult to financial injury. ‘Borrow a dress for a big night out’ and ‘Shop at auctions or pawn shops for jewelry’ were among the tips it offered. And then it suggested, ‘Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.’ ” Dumpster diving into the American dream. You can’t make stuff like that up, and this book is full of such revealing anecdotes.

It is also chockablock with stories of daily humiliations and insults administered to employees by their superiors and/or the policies of the companies they work for. Men being shouted at and demeaned as though by a bullying parent, women being subjected to lewd advances or told to choose between rushing to a sick or stranded child or keeping their jobs. Old-timers will tell you in the vernacular that in the bad old days when the U.S. was a factory and forge society, the foreman kept a red-hot poker stuck up your ass from when you clocked in to when you clocked out. It seems from Greenhouse’s book that for millions of workers, America in the info, human relations, fuzzy-wuzzy age of grief counselors, anxiety pills, empathy and sensitivity offers workplace treatment which is the same as it was in the era of the satanic mills. The dignity of labor? Forget it.

We have become a nation of mules. It’s work, work, work all the time. ” … The average American worker clocked 1,804 hours of work in 2006 – three full-time weeks more per year than the average British worker, six weeks more than the average French worker, and nine weeks more than the average German worker,” writes Greenhouse. And, mind you, the day is long gone that the standard of living in those countries lagged behind ours.

On an hourly basis, American workers are not, as once they were, more productive than those in comparable nations. They are less so. It could be because sleep deprivation and overwork have put them into a half-zombie zone.

If you go back to the Sunday supplements of the Eisenhower era, you can read discussions of what Americans were going to do with the huge amounts of free leisure time that “automation” was about to bestow on them. The automation came with the computers and digitalization of everything, including the hair in your nostrils, and, pari passu with it, the imposition of ever longer hours of work. In a society which reduces them to individualized atoms and then smashes the atoms, employees of every sort and status except the highest have no place to look for protection.

“In many countries there is, in essence, a legal break that limits overwork. In the twenty-seven countries of the European Union, employers are required to give workers at least four weeks’ vacation each year. In Norway and Sweden, workers are guaranteed five weeks’ vacation, while workers in France and Spain generally receive six weeks. The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that does not legislate a minimum number of vacation days each year. American workers averaged just twelve days of vacation annually, and 36 percent of Americans say they do not take all the vacation days due them,” Greenhouse tells his readers.

No discussion of working days and hours should stop without examining what such unstinting labor outside the home does to family life. One of the strengths of Greenhouse’s book is that it does, within the limits of time and topic, tackle the consequences of the information he presents.

During the last 30 years of stagnation and decline for working Americans, the political party associated with business has been unrelenting in going after its Democratic rivals as the anti-family, pro-abortion, smut and homosexual party. This has netted that political party much mileage and many an election win, but all the queers and all the flits and all the gays in history lumped together cannot have had the deleterious effects on modern family life that low compensation and long hours have had.

The numbers cited by Greenhouse explain why: ” … 59 percent of mothers with children under six do paid work and so do 55 percent with children under one, about half of them full time. One reason for today’s increased time bind … is that in the modern middle-class American household, both parents taken together work 540 more hours per year – 13.5 more weeks per year – than parents did a generation ago. In two out of three American families with small children in which both parents work, the couples work more than 80 total hours per week.”

Beyond compensating staff too little to enable parents to have the time to care for their children properly, employers are rigidly indifferent to the unforeseen crises and nasty surprises which inevitably attend the economically forced separation of children from their parents. To drive the point home, Greenhouse says: “Many employers do surprisingly little to help workers juggle work and family. Some retailers post their worker’s weekly schedules only a few days in advance, making it hard to plan child care. Many businesses require employees to work overtime at a moment’s notice, leaving many workers in a bind when their baby sitter is scheduled to leave. Nearly half of American workers are not entitled to paid sick days … many workers risk getting fired when they stay home to care for the sick children.”

How the forced absence of parents plays into the continuing downward slide of academic accomplishments by millions of schoolchildren is beyond the scope of this book but not beyond our thinking. Two-, three- and four-job families are not in good shape to supervise homework, meet with teachers or uphold their end of the PTA. Children left to their own devices in this country fall prey to the advertising which whisks them off to game, movie, music, sneaker, celebrity, cell phone etc. land, where fun and entertainment obliterate three-quarters of their lives and instill in them sets of preferences and beliefs which keep many of them in ox-brained thralldom the rest of their existences.

One would have assumed such questions would have been a burning political issue these past 30 years, but far from it. Discussions of them have been boxed out and labeled as a woman’s issue or, worse, a feminist issue. At the same time, business executives and trade associations complain with increasing vehemence about the untaught, ignorant and under-motivated young people coming out of our high schools and colleges, yet their part in the numbing of youth goes undiscussed for fear anyone who might bring it up will be accused of waging class warfare.

No book on this subject can skip Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States with 1.3 million-plus workers, whose average pay last year was $1,500 under the poverty line for a family of four. Greenhouse devotes a chapter in his book to the company, pointing out that its effects and influence are enormous. Business schools hold it up as the ideal way to run a business, and competitors are forced to adopt its practices because of its size alone.

Anyone who has walked into a Wal-Mart is aware of the size of the individual stores, but the stores themselves do not begin to hint at the dimensions of this organization. “Its sales represent an astonishing 2.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product,” Greenhouse writes. “It is three times as large as the world’s second-largest retailer, Carrefour of France. Its sales are greater than the combined sales of Target, Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Safeway, Albertson’s, and Kroger. Some retail consultants predict that it will become the world’s first $1 trillion company in a dozen years. Each week 130 million shoppers visit its 4,000 US stores, and each year 82 percent of American households shop at Wal-Mart. It is the nation’s largest grocer, and will have 35 percent of the nation’s food market and 25 percent of the pharmacy market by the end of this decade, according to Retail Forward, a consulting firm. Wal-Mart already sells one-third of the nation’s disposable diapers, toothpaste, shampoo, laundry detergent, paper towels and nonprescription drugs, and some say it could soon capture a 50 percent share for those products.”

It may also be the world’s biggest crook. It forces its workers to labor off the clock for no compensation. It locks them up overnight to make them restock shelves, etc., for free. It hires illegals via subcontractors. It discriminates against women. It violates the child labor laws. It cheats and uses short cuts in more ways than there is space to enumerate. So massive is the indignation at what this behemoth does that a small but vigorous anti-Wal-Mart industry has sprung up to try to throw a halter on the beast, with but indifferent success.

In a time of shrinking purchasing power, Wal-Mart’s low prices have been a godsend for millions, but at the rate things are moving, millions won’t have enough to buy even at Wal-Mart. Greenhouse makes a point of demonstrating how Wal-Mart’s arrival in a community depresses everybody’s wages throughout the area. So the question is: Do people save more or lose more because of Wal-Mart’s arrival?

A case can be made that Wal-Mart’s executives long since should have been arrested and taken out of their Bentonville, Ark., headquarters in handcuffs, but they have escaped having to answer for what their company does, much as other business people do who break the nation’s weak labor laws, whether that be by cheating employees of their pay or forcing them to labor under unhealthy conditions or chiseling on workmen’s compensation, etc. Workers who steal get caught and prosecuted; the men and women they work for do not.

Greenhouse discusses a number of ways of lessening the big squeeze’s pressure on people in the face of free trade and massive immigration. To name a few, he has hopes for raising the earned income tax credit and would change the law to make corporations like Wal-Mart criminally liable for their contractors’ labor law violations. He tackles the question of the courts blessing settlements of suits against companies that pay in secret without admitting how they have screwed their workers. He would have the government send some executives to prison for crimes against their employees, just as they are jailed for crimes against their stockholders. All good suggestions with some hope of congressional enactment if the Democrats get in and the lobbyists do not get to them first.

Among Greenhouse’s many suggestions is the revival of union power and membership. The deck is so stacked against the lone, unorganized, unprotected employee that the squeeze is only going to get tighter. Collective action for Americans indoctrinated for decades with the conviction that lack of money is a character flaw is a hard sell. A rebirth of trade unionism also depends upon major changes in federal government policies. For that to happen, Greenhouse recognizes, the National Labor Relations Board would have to be pried away from business control and laws governing union organizing and tactics restored to something like what they were in the New Deal period.

If enough people read The Big Squeeze, that may come to pass. Well researched and written to be easily read, this book should get people out from in front of their flat-screen HD television sets to try to do something about what has been happening to us and our country.

Nicholas von Hoffman, a former columnist for The Washington Post and a former commentator for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” is a regular columnist for The New York Observer. He is the author of numerous books, including “Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies” and “Capitalist Fools: Tales of American Business From Carnegie to Forbes to the Milken Gang.”

Kucinich presents Bush impeachment articles

Source: Raw Story.

An Ohio Democratic lawmaker and former presidential candidate has presented articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush to Congress.

Thirty-five articles were presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to the House of Representatives late Monday evening, airing live on C-SPAN.

“The House is not in order,” said Kucinich to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), upon which Pelosi pounded her gavel.

“Resolved,” Kucinich then began, “that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate. …

“In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power…”

The first article Kucinich presented, and many that followed, regarded the war in Iraq: “Article 1 – Creating a secret propaganda campaign to manufacture a false case for war against Iraq.”

On several occasions, Kucinich referenced RAW STORY and its noted investigative news chief, Larisa Alexandrovna, as source material for the articles. Two of the RAW STORY pieces Kucinich mentioned are viewable here and here.

Kucinich, a 2004 and 2008 Democratic candidate for the White House, abandoned a prior attempt to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush in January of this year.

In April of 2007, Kucinich presented impeachment articles against Vice President Dick Cheney, but the effort went nowhere. Kucinich exclaimed that “impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.“

Before leaving office in January 2007, then-Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney–currently a Green Party presidential candidate–introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush as her last act in Congress, but that effort also was fruitless.

This video is from C-SPAN, broadcast June 9, 2008.

http://www.rawprint.com/media/2008/0806/cspan_kucinich_impeachment_articles_080609a.flv

Reining in Forfeiture: Common Sense Reform in the War on Drugs

It’s no wonder TPTB want to keep up the charade called the “War” on Drugs—it’s so profitable!

Source: Kyla Dunn, PBS Frontline.

Rudy Ramirez never expected to become a statistic in the War on Drugs when he set off to buy a used car, $7300 in cash at the ready, in January 2000. Ramirez, who lives in Edinburg, Texas near the border with Mexico, had spotted a listing for the used Corvette in a magazine and wanted it badly enough that he talked his brother-in-law into accompanying him on a thousand mile road trip to Missouri to make the purchase. When Ramirez was pulled over by police in Kansas City, however, the tenor of the trip changed.

“They asked if I had any money with me, and I said yes,” recalls Ramirez. “I didn’t think they would take it away. I had nothing to hide.” But the trajectory of the rental car, and the piles of cash, suggested otherwise to police–who suspected him of trafficking drugs from the Mexican border. As Ramirez tells it, he was detained at the side of the road for hours while his car was thoroughly searched and inspected by a drug dog. “They kept asking me, ‘Where are the drugs?’” he recalls. “I told them they had the wrong guy.”

The Drug Enforcement Agency’s file on the case indicates that Ramirez gave officers confused statements about both the money and his destination, and that his extremely brief stay in a Missouri motel looked suspicious. What’s more, the drug dog “alerted” on parts of the car, indicating that drugs could have been there at one time–which, since it was a rental car, may or may not have anything to do with Rudy Ramirez.

Still, the search turned up no drugs of any kind, and the officers finally told Ramirez that he was free to go–but not before confiscating $6,000 of his money in the name of the federal war on drugs in a process known as “forfeiture.” Despite check stubs that he says prove that the money came from a car accident settlement reached several months before, and bank records showing that it was withdrawn from his account just prior to the Missouri trip, Ramirez has, to this day, been unable to get his money returned. He shakes his head as he describes it. “All I want is my money back,” he says.

Last year, almost a billion dollars worth of cash, cars, boats, real estate, and other property was forfeited to the federal government–most of it labeled as drug-related. And while much of this property was taken from bona fide criminals, critics of the nation’s forfeiture laws say that too many innocent people have fallen through the cracks in a system that, until recently, has been far too heavily slanted in the government’s favor.

Watch a special video report on small businessman Clay Waterman, who believes he was an innocent victim of the forfeiture laws.

Retreat is rare in our nation’s drug war–which makes recent roll-backs to the forfeiture laws all the more remarkable. In their scramble not to appear “soft on crime,” lawmakers normally seem able only to get tougher, even amidst widespread agreement that a policy is flawed.

But on August 23rd, 2000, after a difficult seven-year campaign by Republican Congressman Henry Hyde from Illinois, the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act finally went into effect–making it more difficult for the federal government to seize property without evidence of wrongdoing. It took a remarkable coalition of conservative and liberal lawmakers, to change a law that everyone from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Rifle Association has recognized as flawed. And while the reforms come too late to help Rudy Ramirez, they will help to make cases like his rarer.

Law dictionaries define forfeiture as “loss of some right or property as a penalty for some illegal act,” and its role as a tool in the war on drugs is clear: to hit drug dealers where it hurts most…in the wallet. The forfeiture laws allow the government to seize property from people it believes to be involved in drug-related activity, and then to use that revenue to bolster the efforts of law enforcement. The concept is simple. If you use your car, plane or boat to transport drugs, you will lose your car, plane or boat. And if your cash was acquired through illegal drug sales, you will lose that cash and anything bought with it.

Forfeitures, however, can fall into two categories–criminal or civil–and due to some high-profile abuses, civil asset forfeiture has become extremely controversial. Under criminal law, the government can seize property as punishment only after its owner has been convicted of a crime, and our justice system ensures that they are considered innocent until proven guilty. But under civil law, it is the property itself–not the owner–that is charged with involvement in a crime. What’s more, that property is considered “guilty” until proven innocent in court by its owner, thus turning our usual system of justice on its head.

According to a report prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee, at least 90 percent of the property that the federal government seeks to forfeit is pursued through civil asset forfeiture. And although forfeiture is intended as punishment for illegal activity, over 80% of the people whose property is seized under civil law are never even charged with a crime according to one study of over 500 federal cases by the Pittsburgh Press. For this reason, critics say, the system can run roughshod over the rights of innocent property owners–and fail to distinguish them from the guilty.

This potential for abuse is compounded by the strong financial incentive that law enforcement has to make seizures–since they benefit directly from forfeited property. It was the passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, part of the Reagan-era ramp-up in the war on drugs, that first made this possible. At a federal level, the law established two new forfeiture funds: one at the U.S. Department of Justice, which gets revenue from forfeitures done by agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and another now run by the U.S. Treasury, which gets revenue from agencies like Customs and the Coast Guard. These funds could now be used for forfeiture-related expenses, payments to informants, prison building, equipment purchase, and other general law enforcement purposes.

But equally important, local law enforcement would now get a piece of the pie. Within the 1984 Act was a provision for so-called “equitable sharing”, which allows local law enforcement agencies to receive a portion of the net proceeds of forfeitures they help make under federal law–and under current policy, that can be up to 80%. Previously, seized assets had been handed over to the federal government in their entirety.

Immediately following passage of the Act, federal forfeitures increased dramatically. The amount of revenue deposited into the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund, for example, soared from $27 million in 1985 to $644 million in 1991–a more than twenty-fold increase. And as forfeitures increased, so did the amount of money flowing back to state and local law enforcement through equitable sharing.

Some say that because of the resulting windfall, state and local law enforcement has become as addicted to forfeiture as an addict is to drugs–making property seizure no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself. In 1999 alone, approximately $300 million of the $957 million that the Treasury and Justice Department funds took in went back to the state and local departments that helped with the seizures. And since 1986, the Department of Justice’s equitable sharing program has distributed over $2 billion in cash and property. Additional revenue comes from forfeitures done under state law, which adds to the total intake. According to a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, state and local law enforcement reported receiving a total of over $700 million in drug-related asset forfeiture revenue in 1997 alone–with some departments single-handedly taking in several million dollars for their own use.

The potentially corrupting influence of this flow of cash is apparent from a situation currently unfolding in the state of Missouri–where, in what has become a highly controversial practice, mirrored across the country, police are circumventing their own state law in order to continue reaping the financial rewards of civil asset forfeiture.

In 1993, in response to some widely-publicized police abuses, the Missouri State Legislature passed a sweeping reform of the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws. The new state law, one of the most stringent in the nation, required that a property owner be convicted of a felony in court before property related to that crime can be forfeited. What’s more, the law required all proceeds from the forfeitures to go to a state education fund–not back to law enforcement. The reforms provided strong protection to innocent property owners, making it much harder to forfeit property under Missouri law than under federal law, and eliminated the police profit motive for making seizures.

In the face of these restrictions, however, Missouri’s law enforcement has implemented what critics call an elaborate shell game that allows it to continue doing forfeitures under the laxer, federal laws–and to continue receiving a share of the profits. The practice walks a very thin semantic line, relying on the distinction between “discovering” and “seizing” cash. Upon discovering cash during a traffic stop that they believe to be drug money, for instance, a local policeman or Missouri Highway Patrol officer will not actually attempt to “seize” it. Instead, they call a federal agent to the scene to perform the seizure, virtually guaranteeing that the case will be processed under federal law and that their department can receive a share of the proceeds instead of sending those proceeds to the state education fund.

A 1999 report by Missouri State Auditor Claire McCaskill, in fact, found that in spite of the reforms to Missouri state law, 85% of the money and property seized on investigations involving Missouri law enforcement is still handled under federal forfeiture laws. “Forfeiture is as American as apple pie,” says McCaskill, who strongly supports its use as a tool in the war on drugs. “The problem is when law enforcement starts circumventing state law in the process.” Missouri’s legislature has been considering reform bills that could end the practice–an issue that will most likely be revived in the coming session–and the Kansas City School District has filed a lawsuit against all of Missouri’s law enforcement.

Bob Boydston, the Sheriff of Clay County, Missouri, says that he has never had to make a decision between using the state versus the federal system–and has followed the state statutes since he took office in 1993. He can definitely understand, however, why his colleagues opt for the federal system when faced with the choice. “One system will ultimately mean that the proceeds leave the agency, while the other returns some of the money to be used to fight illegal drug dealing,” he explains. “After law enforcement spends long, hard, dangerous hours working a case, it seems natural to me that they make the choice to go the federal route. It’s depicted as some kind of sinister plot and plan to circumvent statutes and keep money from the schools. That’s not the case at all.”

Boydston’s county of 15 towns and 180,000 people just north of Kansas City has experienced the benefits of forfeiture proceeds first-hand. Assisting in just one federal forfeiture, of which Clay County’s share was $94,000, has allowed the sheriff’s department to train a drug dog, and maintain a military surplus helicopter that it uses for surveillance work, highway pursuits, and support for the efforts of the department’s SWAT team. These are expenses that Boydston says the department could never have afforded otherwise over the past three years–but that are crucial to helping combat the county’s extensive methamphetamine problem.

Financial incentives aside, many of Missouri’s law enforcement officers say that they choose to process forfeitures under federal law for another reason as well: while federal law gives them a fighting chance of taking the profits out of drug dealing, state law does not. They feel strongly that, due to the felony conviction requirement, the new state law allows too many drug dealers to walk free, unpunished, with piles of cash, when there is not enough concrete evidence to convict them of a drug-related felony.

But it is the laxer provisions of the federal law that, until recently, have created enormous hardships for innocent people caught up in the system. Many property owners have faced years of difficult and costly litigation before winning back money, cars, homes and businesses that were never involved in a crime. And others have never had their property returned at all. It is these cases, tracked by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and highlighted in congressional hearings, that have fueled the drive for reform at a national level.

In many cases, people like Rudy Ramirez have been suspected of involvement in drug trafficking for no more reason than its being “unusual” in this day and age to possess a thick wad of cash. Take the example of Willie Jones, a landscape architect who was carrying $9,600 through the Nashville airport on his way to buy shrubbery. Or the case of physician Richard Lowe who–distrustful of banks, and with vivid memories of the Great Depression–stockpiled $317,000 in his home in Alabama before finally depositing it in a bank, leading the government to confiscate a full $2.5 million of his life savings for this suspicious behavior.

Of particular importance to conservative lawmakers, small businesses have suffered under these laws as well. In one well-publicized case, federal agents sought to forfeit the Red Carpet Inn in Houston, Texas when, despite the hotel staff’s frequent contact with police, the local U.S. attorney said the owners had “tacitly approved” of drug dealing on their property and not done enough to prevent it. The hotel’s owners were not charged with any crime, but had rejected police “solutions” to the problem such as raising their room rates to deter drug dealers from staying there.

Henry Hyde has called stories like these “Kafkaesque,” and recalls that when he first learned of the nation’s civil forfeiture practices, he considered them “more appropriate for the Soviet Union than the United States.” What’s more, he’s said, “People take their due process rights for granted…they have no idea that these laws exist.”

Critics agree that the main problem with the civil asset forfeiture laws, before the recent reforms, was the low burden of proof required to seize property. A seizure could be made on the basis of mere suspicion, known as “probable cause”, that the property was involved in a crime–and that is no more evidence than is required to obtain a search warrant. No arrest, let alone conviction, was needed. It was then up to the property owner to prove by “a preponderance of the evidence”, a more difficult standard to meet, that their money, or car, or home, was not bought with drug money or used to commit a drug-related crime, and should be returned.

Furthermore, the high cost of contesting a forfeiture often posed an insurmountable problem, as it did for Rudy Ramirez. In order to take his case to court, Ramirez would have had to post a “cost bond” of 10% of the value of the property seized–and if he lost the case he would lose the bond. But for a landscaping truck driver who is barely getting by, scraping together another $600 was no minor hurdle. “I don’t have money to be wasting,” says Ramirez. What’s more, unlike a defendant in a criminal trial, Ramirez was not entitled to a government-appointed attorney if he could not afford a private lawyer. He would have had to hire the attorney at his own expense–and as Bruce Simon, a Missouri lawyer to whom Ramirez went for help, explains, no lawyer in the country would likely take that case.

“Generally speaking, it’s not worth it unless you’ve had twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars taken away,” says Simon. It would have cost a minimum of around $10,000 to take a case like Ramirez’ to court, says Simon, so the $6,000 he would have gotten back wouldn’t even cover his lawyer’s fees. As a result of these blunt financial realities, Simon has seen many innocent owners simply give up without a fight when faced with a system that provides “no effective remedy” for them.

Eighty percent of forfeitures, in fact, go uncontested in court–a statistic that the government feels suggests that the owners are guilty, and do not wish to force the issue, but some others feel shows that the system is stacked too heavily in the government’s favor. According to a Justice Department source, the average value of a DEA seizure in 1998 was around $25,000. And lawyers say this confirms that many seizures are small enough to fall below the amount they would consider worthwhile to contest.

In the absence of a court case, the only recourse left to someone like Rudy Ramirez is to petition the DEA directly to return the money–a so-called “administrative” solution. But Bruce Simon asks, how likely is the DEA to believe that its agents have made a mistake? “That would mean the agency passing judgement on itself,” he explains, saying that most of those claims “never get anywhere.” According to the DEA’s own estimates, in fact, only 3-5% of such petitions are ever granted.

This bleak picture began to change in April of this year, however, when the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act was finally signed into federal law. The success caps a nearly decade-long crusade, and is the result of cooperation between some truly unlikely allies who, only by working together, could overpower Congress’ fear of looking “soft on crime”. Henry Hyde, a conservative Republican from Illinois and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was joined by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, John Conyers of Michigan, to spearhead the effort–which united politicians as diverse as outspoken conservative Bob Barr of Georgia with Democratic liberal Barney Frank of Massachusetts. An equally impressive coalition formed in the Senate around the issue.

Joining in support were organizations as wide-ranging as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association, the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Americans for Tax Reform, and organizations representing groups like pilots, boaters and hotel owners.

The new law requires the government to have much stronger evidence of wrongdoing before it can seize a person’s property–raising the burden of proof from “probable cause” to “a preponderance of the evidence” that the property is linked to a crime. What’s more, it shifts the burden of proof to the federal government, meaning that the government must now prove in court that the property was involved in crime…instead of the property owner needing to prove the opposite.

Equally important for people like Rudy Ramirez, the new law removes many of the onerous financial hurdles involved in contesting a forfeiture. It refunds lawyers’ fees to property owners who successfully challenge a seizure in court, and in some cases provides government-paid lawyers to the indigent. Furthermore, it eliminates the requirement that property owners post a sometimes hefty bond before they can fight to get their property back.

The Justice Department and national law enforcement groups lobbied furiously to prevent passage of the original bill put forward by Henry Hyde, concerned that it jeopardized a key weapon in the war on drugs. Hyde’s original version, in fact, contained much stronger provisions–and sought to raise the burden of proof on the government to “clear and convincing evidence” that the seized property was criminally-linked.

Ray Dineen, Director of the Treasury Department’s Forfeiture Fund, voiced concerns early on about the potential weakening of a valuable law enforcement tool. He says that the country must not forget the purpose of seizing cars, offshore bank accounts, planes, boats, and other property that supports the drug trade, which is to dismantle a criminal infrastructure that was illegally acquired in the first place. He adds, “The fact that revenue generated by this effort is subsequently used to support law enforcement initiatives is smart policy–not a program of unchecked ‘taking.’ We’re not looking for money, we’re looking for the impact on criminal enterprises.”

In the end, both the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury have come out cautiously in favor of the final compromise legislation–saying that raising the burden of proof needed to make a seizure is sensible protection for innocent property owners. Still, they predict a loss of revenue, and have concerns about the possibility of frivolous court cases being brought by criminals under the new law.

Civil rights activists like the ACLU aren’t entirely satisfied either, which may be the sign of a good compromise. “We think this just begins to address the problem,” said Rachel King, legislative counsel of the ACLU, when the law first passed. “The situation is so bad that even modest reforms are important.”

Make no mistake about it, the recent reforms do not address the issue that many feel is central to most abuses of civil asset forfeiture: the financial incentive for law enforcement to make seizures. Still, the new law will help ensure that legitimate use of a powerful tool in the war on drugs violates the rights of fewer innocent people.

“This bill is one we can all be proud of,” Henry Hyde said of the final version. “It returns civil asset forfeiture to the ranks of respected law enforcement tools that can be used without risk to the civil liberties and property rights of American citizens. We are all better off that this is so.” And in the war on drugs, that is a bold step forward–and a kind of reform that is all too rare.

Belgian colza fields contaminated with banned GMOs

Source: AFP.

©Unknown
Traces left by acricultural vehicles on a colza field

Fifteen Belgian colza fields, owned by Bayer CropScience, have been contaminated by genetically modified organisms (GMOs) banned in Europe, the country’s public health ministry announced Tuesday.

The Bayer subsidiary, which specialises in improving crop yields, informed the Belgian authorities of the contamination, which happened last month during the planting of normal colza — a crop similar to rapeseed and used in cattlefeed, cooking oil, machinery lubricant and, increasingly, as a biofuel.

“The conventional seed lot was contaminated by five percent GMO colza,” the statement said.

A preliminary investigation carried out by the multinational put the problem down to “human error.”

Bayer “has taken measures to prevent the spread of non-authorised GMOs” including the uprooting and destruction of the young crop, which had not yet flowered or produced grain.

The fields will be monitored for several years for signs of any genetically modified plants.

The ministry said it would inform the European Commission and EU member states of the matter and the remedial measures taken.

Oil shortage a myth, says industry insider

I’m not completely sold on the Peak Oil theory, but I still think we need to find and use alternative energy sources as much as possible.

Source: Steve Connor, The Independent.

There is more than twice as much oil in the ground as major producers say, according to a former industry adviser who claims there is widespread misunderstanding of the way proven reserves are calculated.

©The Independent

Although it is widely assumed that the world has reached a point where oil production has peaked and proven reserves have sunk to roughly half of original amounts, this idea is based on flawed thinking, said Richard Pike, a former oil industry man who is now chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Current estimates suggest there are 1,200 billion barrels of proven global reserves, but the industry’s internal figures suggest this amounts to less than half of what actually exists.

The misconception has helped boost oil prices to an all-time high, sending jitters through the market and prompting calls for oil-producing nations to increase supply to push down costs.

Flying into Japan for a summit two days after prices reached a record $139 a barrel, energy ministers from the G8 countries yesterday discussed an action plan to ease the crisis.

Explaining why the published estimates of proven global reserves are less than half the true amount, Dr Pike said there was anecdotal evidence that big oil producers were glad to go along with under-reporting of proven reserves to help maintain oil’s high price. “Part of the oil industry is perfectly familiar with the way oil reserves are underestimated, but the decision makers in both the companies and the countries are not exposed to the reasons why proven oil reserves are bigger than they are said to be,” he said.

Dr Pike’s assessment does not include unexplored oilfields, those yet to be discovered or those deemed too uneconomic to exploit.

The environmental implications of his analysis, based on more than 30 years inside the industry, will alarm environmentalists who have exploited the concept of peak oil to press the urgency of the need to find greener alternatives.

“The bad news is that by underestimating proven oil reserves we have been lulled into a false sense of security in terms of environmental issues, because it suggests we will have to find alternatives to fossil fuels in a few decades,” said Dr Pike. “We should not be surprised if oil dominates well into the twenty-second century. It highlights a major error in energy and environmental planning – we are dramatically underestimating the challenge facing us,” he said.

Proven oil reserves are likely to be far larger than reported because of the way the capacity of oilfields is estimated and how those estimates are added to form the proven reserves of a company or a country. Companies add the estimated capacity of oil fields in a simple arithmetic manner to get proven oil reserves. This gives a deliberately conservative total deemed suitable for shareholders who do not want proven reserves hyped, Dr Pike said.

However, mathematically it is more accurate to add the proven oil capacity of individual fields in a probabilistic manner based on the bell-shaped statistical curve used to estimate the proven, probable and possible reserves of each field. This way, the final capacity is typically more than twice that of simple, arithmetic addition, Dr Pike said. “The same also goes for natural gas because these fields are being estimated in much the same way. The world is understating the environmental challenge and appears unprepared for the difficult compromises that will have to be made.”

Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone, a book on peak oil, is not convinced that Dr Pike is right. “The flow rates from the existing projects are the key. Capacity coming on stream falls fast beyond 2011,” Dr Leggett said. “On top of that, if the big old fields begin collapsing, the descent in supply will hit the world very hard.”

Paul Offit: WHY IS ANYONE TAKING THIS GUY SERIOUSLY?

I hope I’ll have the time to listen to the mp3 file of the teleconference for pediatricians sponsored by the Pennsylvania Immunization Education Program; the link is below.

Source: Wade Rankin, Injecting Sense.

Before I joined the corporate world, I spent many years as a litigator. One of my most frustrating experiences in the courtroom came when a judge (who was well past his prime) allowed the other side’s expert testify in technical areas well beyond his expertise. I have much the same reaction whenever I hear Paul Offit speak.

Dr. Offit, of course, is a specialist in infectious diseases. My understanding is that he does not have a private practice. Indeed, he would have almost no time for it. He spends his time working on the development of new vaccines, acting as a spokesman for the vaccine industry, writing books, and generally holding himself out as an expert in a variety of fields regardless of any expertise he may have in those fields.

Reportedly, he is presently at work on a book about autism, although I doubt he has ever treated a single patient for autism. And without really understanding what autism is, does he really have the qualifications to expound on what may trigger ASD?

Of course, Doc O has never let a little thing like lack of qualifications stop him before. It is his repeated pronouncements on the deficiency of the American legal system ⎯ an area I know a little about ⎯ that drives me crazy.

Doc O recently presented at a teleconference for pediatricians sponsored by the Pennsylvania Immunization Education Program. It’s now available on-line. The subject was how to reassure parents that they should continue to rigidly adhere to the official vaccine schedule in the post-Poling era.

Although he spent time discussing his opinions on the theoretical dangers of the number of vaccines (or in Offit’s opinion, the absence of any potential danger at all), most of the presentation was devoted to a hysterical rant about the manner in which the legal system deals with cases alleging vaccine damage.

Keep in mind that Doc O was speaking as an expert in public policy and the legal system, yet he insisted on parading his ignorance of that system by continually referring to the “decision” made by “the court” in the Poling matter. There was no decision by the court; there was a concession by the attorneys representing the government (i.e., the defense), which has paved the way for the Poling family to recover damages (an award has not yet been determined). Offit repeated that mischaracterization of what happened several times, to the point of specifically criticizing the special masters (attorneys appointed by the Court of Claims to hear the matter in much the same way as a judge does and to make findings of fact). Finally, when the floor was opened for questions, one of the doctors listening corrected Doc O, the “expert” brushed aside the distinction as mere “legal language” and pronounced that it was a “decision” because they had to decide to concede. Huh?!?!

Offit believes the vaccine compensation system once served a purpose, but has now gone into dangerous turf because the court is having to address claims that do not fit neatly into the vaccine compensation injury table. Parenthetically, I have to admit to getting the giggles when I heard Doc O extol the virtues of the table, which in his own words, “includes injuries, which clearly have been shown either biologically or epidemiologically to be caused by vaccines.” In criticizing the hypothesis of a vaccine connection to ASD, Offit has relied almost exclusively on epidemiology, especially since the mounting biological evidence does not support his beliefs.

In any event, Doc O’s thesis is that we shouldn’t have lawyers making medical decisions. Indeed, there is always a danger of empowering courts of law to determine broad scientific or technical issues. Nobody should believe that the issue will be decided simply because a legal decision is made. The only thing that can happen is that the court will attempt (or not, if one remains skeptical) to reach a just decision based on an understanding of the present state of scientific knowledge. The court’s understanding, of course, may be right or wrong.

The answer, though, is not to take the decision-making power away from the courts. That is the answer Paul Offit clearly wants: to take the issue away from courts of law altogether, and hand such cases over to some kind of body run by the mainstream medical community. That solution puts us on the slippery slope of removing the power entrusted by the founding fathers to the judiciary simply because the subject matter is technical.

There is no doubt that the system is a mess. By mandating the filing of claims within a short temporal window, we are seeing the Court of Claims trying to make sense of a scientific question that is far from settled. There s no easy solution. The interests of potential claimants, dealing with a relatively short period of limitations, have to be balanced against the interest of potential defendants (the industry and/or the Vaccine Compensation Fund) in a reasonably certain period in which they must face liability. But Dr. Offit advocates a lack of balance.

The debate as to how we fix the system is legitimate, and it is important. All interested parties deserve to be heard, but having a spokesman like Paul Offit does nothing to foster a reasonable discussion.

Dr. Offit, in addition to apparently not understanding the most fundamental aspects of the legal system (i.e., the difference between advocates and the finders of fact), continually resorts to utilizing the plaintiffs’ bar as a bogeyman to scare the bejeesus out of us all. He’s done it before in his well-accepted (an acceptance I don’t understand) book on the “Cutter Incident,” in which he deconstructs a very bad court decision from a few decades ago, and then waves it around as a cautionary tale while ignoring some very real corrections the courts took upon themselves.

He’s still using the same scare tactics. In the recent presentation to the pediatricians in Pennsylvania, Doc O said one of the dangers of the Poling “decision” is that personal injury lawyers will now be alerted ” to an area that might become “lucrative,” and they’ll take their claims to state courts.

Now, I am not a big fan of the plaintiffs’ bar. I’ve spent my professional life fighting those guys. I think I know pretty well what motivates them, and they’re not going to see a defense concession in a single case as being a green light on the road to riches. Those guys want easier pickings with a lot less waiting time. That’s why the vast majority of plaintiff lawyers who jumped on the bandwagon jumped off a long time ago.

But using scare tactics and misrepresenting his opponent’s position is what Paul Offit does best. He is finally acknowledging that the debate is broader than just the MMR or just thimerosal. But he does so by sneering about “shifting hypotheses.” Maybe I’m just a layman when it comes to science, but I thought the entire idea was to keep exploring until you find the truth. What we seem to be finding is that neither the MMR hypothesis nor the thimerosal hypothesis were wrong per se, but neither were right in an of themselves. Both appear to be part of a broader process that we are only starting to understand. Understanding the problem, however, may not be in Paul Offit’s interest.

My overriding interest in this question is the health and wellbeing of my son. That interest dictates that I constantly reexamine the validity of what I believe the truth to be, so that I may help my child. Paul Offit’s interest in seeing that the status quo is not disturbed seems to be a very curious approach for someone who constantly preaches science and the scientific method. Science, like the law, is not meant to be static. Our understanding must evolve as we continue to learn.

In a casual conversation, a pediatrician once told us that he really didn’t have the time to take a good look at issues like the potential connection between vaccination and the triggering of autism. Rather, he simply adopted the position of the AAP as a default. And that’s the same attitude demonstrated by some of the doctors who asked participated in the recent Pennsylvania teleconference. They wanted to know when they could get a “tear sheet” of talking points. One pediatrician bemoaned having to spend five minutes of uncompensated time whenever she was asked questions about vaccine safety. She said that Offit’s argument s would be convincing to “intelligent parents,” a comment which triggered a sarcastic, “yeah, good luck” from Doc O.

That’s the arrogance of Paul Offit. He refuses to use the words “intelligent” and “parents” in the same sentence. He refuses to acknowledge that lawyers and other laypersons are capable of understanding scientific explanations that come forth in a court of law. He refuses to acknowledge that he may not have a monopoly on “the truth.”

Paul Offit is an expert in the field of infectious diseases. Although one may disagree with his opinions in that field, he certainly deserves a respectful listen when he speaks on issues relating to his specialty. He is woefully ignorant, however, about autism, and he has demonstrated repeatedly a complete lack of understanding about the American legal system (which one would think is a lot easier to understand than infectious diseases). Why is it that he continually speaks as an expert on the issues he is least qualified to address.? Why is anyone taking this guy seriously?

ADDENDUM:

After drafting this post, I found out that Paul Offit will be on a panel for the 2008 US Court of Federal Claims Judicial Conference. The session is entitled “Vaccine Compensation Under the Act: A Mix of Science and Policy?,” and it appears that Offit will be the only physician to participate. Could the conference coordinator not have done better?

Global military spending soars 45% in 10 years; USA accounts for half of increase

Source: Agence France Presse.

World military spending grew 45 percent in the past decade, with the United States accounting for nearly half of all expenditure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Monday.

Military spending grew six percent last year alone, according to SIPRI’s annual report.

In 2007, 1,339 billion dollars (851 billion euros) was spent on arms and other military expenditure, corresponding to 2.5 percent of global gross domestic product, or GDP — or 202 dollars for each of the world’s 6.6 billion people.

The United States spends by far the most towards military aims, dishing out 547 billion dollars last year, or 45 percent of global expenditure.

Britain, China, France and Japan, the next in line of big spenders, lag far behind, accounting for just four to five percent of world military costs each.

“The factors driving increases in world military spending include countries’ foreign policy objectives, real or perceived threats, armed conflict and policies to contribute to multilateral peacekeeping operations, combined with the availability of economic resources,” the SIPRI report said.

The increase is both “excessive and obscene,” Jayantha Dhanapala, a SIPRI member formerly in charge of disarmament affairs at the United Nations, told reporters in Stockholm, where the annual report was presented.

Registering the greatest regional growth was Eastern Europe, which saw its military spending skyrocket 162 percent between 1998 and 2007 and 15 percent from 2006 to 2007.

Russia, whose expenditure ballooned 13 percent last year, was responsible for 86 percent of the growth in the region, according to SIPRI.

North America meanwhile saw its military spending swell 65 percent, largely pulled by the United States, which has seen its costs grow 59 percent since the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

“By 2007, US spending was higher than at any time since World War II,” the SIPRI report said.

In the past decade, the Middle East has boosted military expenditure by 62 percent, South Asia by 57 percent and Africa and East Asia by 51 percent each.

Western Europe was the region with the least military spending growth at just six percent, followed by Central America at 14 percent.

At a national level, “China has increased its military spending threefold in real terms during the past decade,” SIPRI said, adding however that “due to its rapid economic growth, the economic burden of military spending is still moderate, at 2.1 percent of GDP.”

As a direct result of the increased military outlay, sales by the world’s 100 leading arms producing companies (excluding in China) jumped nearly nine percent in 2006 compared to the year before to 315 billion dollars, SIPRI said.

Sixty-three of the 100 top weapons firms are based in the United States and Western Europe, accounting alone for 292.3 billion dollars in sales in 2006, the last year for which SIPRI has numbers.

In its report, the group also said 14 major armed conflicts raged around the world last year — the same number as in 2006. In 2001, there were 20, SIPRI said.

“A new type of conflict is emerging and we are seeing a fragmentation of violence,” in places such as Iraq and Sudan’s Darfur province, SIPRI researcher Ekaterina Stepanova told the Stockholm press conference.

This non-state violence “may have devastating consequences for civilians. All the actors tend to be opportunistic and may change sides,” she added.

On an upbeat note, SIPRI chief Bates Gill meanwhile said both candidates in this year’s US presidential election could help pave the way for “the most promising opportunities to see real progress in the nuclear arms control that we have seen in the last 10 years.”

Dr. Mark Hyman Shares Information on Nutrition, Toxins and Vitamins

While I’m all for eating lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, I have trouble with articles that promote vegetarian diets, and then say how you need B vitamins like folic acid, B6 and B12 (whose best sources are from meat and organs), and what supplements you should take to make up for this lack in diet.

Other important nutrients from meat are: carnosine, carnitine, creatine, taurine, long chain omega-3 fats, zinc, iron, CLA, vitamins A and D (contrary to most veg-promoting information, plant-based foods only contain carotenoids).

Source: Natural News.

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s The Healthiest Year of Your Life Program which can be found at (http://www.thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) . In this excerpt, Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. weighs in on nutrition, toxins and finding the right vitamins.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life Excerpt with Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., a best-selling author, a respected medical consultant and a leader in the field of functional medicine.

Kevin: Let’s talk a little bit about the raw food and vegan diet and how it fits into this type of functional medicine.

Mark: Sure. I think everybody is different and I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all diet. Some people thrive on a vegetarian diet. Other people are extraordinarily sick on a vegan or vegetarian diet. I’ve had many patients on raw foods and vegan diets who are extraordinarily malnourished. Then I’ve seen people who manage it quite well.

I think you have to look at what’s right for each person. So I don’t think that any general recommendations are helpful. I also think it depends on where you live. If you’re living in Manitoba, a raw food diet is probably not the best thing. If you’re living on the island in Fiji, you probably could thrive on a raw food diet. It’s also “think locally, eat locally”. I think it’s a very important thing. What’s local? What’s native to your area? What’s going on with your own biology and genetics and body. I think you have to be careful if you’re doing a raw food, or vegan diet. It’s easy to become malnourished and you have to supplement, I believe, with nutrients and really be smart about it.

Kevin: Anything specific?

Mark: What I would say is that probably 90% of your diet should be a plant-based diet. Whether it’s cooked or uncooked, I think Michael Pollan said, “Eat food, meaning real food.” Not too much and mostly plants. Plant foods have all the phytochemicals and nutrients and things that your body needs to thrive and without them you don’t. The phytochemicals that are from colorful fruits and vegetables in plant foods that are essential for life.

Kevin: What are some of the most potent toxins that you encounter?

Mark: I would say probably without a doubt, the most serious threat to our health in terms of toxins is mercury. It’s something I see and treat every day that affects, I would say, the majority of my patients in one way or another. It’s important to identify. It’s mostly ignored and it’s relatively easy and safe to treat.

Kevin: Anything else?

Mark: Well, I think the rest of it is all common sense. We should be eating food that’s organic whenever we can. We should stay away from hormones, pesticides and antibiotics and any animal products. There are over 3500 food additives added to our food supply. There’s no reason that we need to be eating anything other than food.

Kevin: Yeah. What I like about your books and your programs is that you give real world examples of things working. What are some of your favorite stories, or favorite successes?

Mark: Well, I have many, many of them. One of them was a doctor who had been sick for 30 years and had chronic fatigue and heavy metal poisoning. She was overweight, had diabetes, couldn’t sleep. She was depressed and not able to function anymore. She had some very deep issues and we detoxified her and used heavy metal detoxification, used intravenous glutathione, sauna therapy, a whole integrated approach and she recently performed in a triathlon, which is fantastic for someone who could barely get out of bed. So that was a very gratifying experience.

I’d seen another woman who had severe depression for 30 years and when we detoxified her she got better… Another young girl who was unable to focus or concentrate on multiple psychiatric medications, but with sauna therapy and intravenous treatment for toxicity, as well as oral treatment, she did phenomenally well and said to me the other day, “Dr. Hyman, I had not even been able to read a magazine or book in seven years and I feel I have myself back and I wake up every day happy and alive, where I thought I was going to kill myself.”

Kevin: Wow. You mentioned glutathione. Can you explain what that is for people who don’t know?

Mark: Yeah. The body had its own system for detoxifying and the major force in that system is glutathione. It is the body’s major detoxifier and it’s made from a number of amino acids, glutamine, cysteine and lysine that are eaten in our food, mostly in sulfur containing foods, such as whey protein or eggs, garlic, and the broccoli family. It’s critical in the detoxification process, as well as the major antioxidants and it’s also involved in immune function and inflammation, but what happens is that because of our overwhelming toxic load and because half of us have a gene that makes us not too able to actually do this, then we become depleted in glutathione. So we have to learn, one, that if we are and two, we have to actually do a lot of things to boost our own glutathione levels, which we can do through diet, eating broccoli and collards and the whole cruciferous family and the garlic family, taking herbs or using various supplements, like vitamin C, selenium, zinc and cystine and lypoic acid and a number of other things. So all of these things are ways we can actually help the body detoxify.

Kevin: What do you think about the philosophy of intuitive eating? Do you think there’s some ground to that, that your body knows what to eat and when to eat it?

Mark: Well, certainly that’s true of animals, right? And it’s certainly true of babies. They self regulate. I think we have to recognize that our bodies have innate wisdom and that if we provide things which are naturally supportive of our body’s physiology, it will self regulate. I think that when we get off of the toxic foods, these are extraordinarily addictive kinds of substances and the additives and sugars and high fructose corn syrup and trans fats, our bodies self regulate very well.

Kevin: Now, I want to talk about some of the things that you’ve covered in some of your books, like feed reactive protein and homocysteine and those effects on health. I think it’s kind of important to know what those are and what someone can do to recognize if they have high levels of them.

Mark: Right. What I do talk about in all The Seven Chis to Ultra Wellness and in my books are how to look at each systems. There are tests you can do if you think you have a problem, so if you take the quiz and you find you have an issue in one or a different area, what you do about it is included and there are a lot of different tests I use. You mentioned two I talked about, but it certainly doesn’t mean that there are only two.

One is called feed reactive protein and it’s a non-specific type of test that measures inflammation. So it’s a very good marker of generalized inflammation in your body. If it’s high it tells you that something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what it’s from, but it tells you there’s something wrong. It will then drive you to look for something. The second thing is that inflammation can also relate to toxicity, but it’s often another allergen or infection, or dietary things, sugar and so forth.

Homocysteine is a marker of a level of folic acid and also a function that we call, methylation, in your body and there’s two things that are required for detoxification. One is sulfation, which is the process of moving around sulfur molecules and producing glutathione and the other is methylation, which is the moving around of carbon and free hydrogen. That is a key function in the body that is involved in every chemical reaction and in order for you to have a proper methylation system, you have to have adequate levels of folate, B6 and B12 and if you’re homocysteine is high, it’s an indicator that you may be deficient and you may have some problems in this area. It’s very easy to treat by getting really, really very good quality folate in special forms, as well as adequate levels of B6 and B12.

Kevin: Is there a way that the consumer can figure out what’s the best quality supplement?

Mark: Yeah. I think there’s generally a couple of things I should say about this. First, there’s no regulation in this industry. So it’s up to self-policing of these companies to determine whether or not they’re actually going to put what they say on the label in the bottle, or whether they’re going to put other things in there that are toxic. There are ways of finding out how these companies do their manufacturing. Do they send their products out for third-party analysis to look for impurities, toxins, as well as the active ingredients? Do they use fillers and additives and shellacs and petrochemicals and colors and dyes in the supplements?

In other words, if you’re taking some of the common multivitamins that are blue and pink, why do you want to be taking blue dye for the rest of your life, if you’re taking a multivitamin? It’s just common sense with some of these things and then there’s generally different places these are sold. For example, in large places like Wal-Mart and Costco they only have poor quality brands and then there will be the drugstore brands and then there will be the health food brands, which are generally better and from smaller companies and then there’s the professional brands, which is what I use, which are really designed for medical and nutritional therapy and they’re a little bit harder to get, but you can get them from various pharmacists and doctors.

Kevin: Great. Well, I do want to wrap up by talking a little bit more about The Ultra Simple Diet.

Mark: Well, The Ultra Simple Diet was something that I wrote almost as an add-on to my
book, Ultra Metabolism and I realized that people needed a quick start and I basically just put together what I’ve learned in my practice over the last 15 years working with people and doing these programs with them on an individual basis and what I found was really profoundly effective. It’s very clear, very simple, laid out step-by-step what to do to help your body take a break and the reason that I designed it this way and that I encourage people to do it is that most people don’t know how bad they feel, number one and number two, that this is a relatively simple thing that anybody can do. It’s not a fasting program, but it is a powerful detoxification program, so you can continue your life without having to stop and go to an island and drink juice all day. I think that it’s extraordinarily effective in helping people connect how bad they feel with what they’re eating and their behaviors, which most people don’t do… They think that their symptoms and how they feel is sort of random. It’s unrelated to what they’re doing and the choices that they’re making, but it’s not and they have full control over it and when they do this program and anybody can do anything for a week, then they make the connection and see how they are acting and how they feel and then they can make a choice. Do I want to feel like this, or not?

Stupid Mainstream Parent Products: Hands-Free Car Seat Carrier & bottle holder

I’m not providing a link—why encourage buying this useless thing? Those ubiquitous car seat carriers are bad enough; but do parents really need one more way NOT to hold their babies?

Here’s another product designed to help moms and dads maintain contact-free parenting: bottle holders. Why use a rolled up baby blanket:

When you can have this cute rice-filled one? It makes alienating parenting oh-so-fashionable!