upon to guide the treatment of patients. It is therefore both dangerous and ominous to consider the profound lack of objectivity and corruption which permeate even the most respectable of medical journals.

Advertising revenues for drugs keep them in business. Peer reviewers (who are supposed to keep the system honest) have considerable financial ties with pharmaceutical companies - the more revered the reviewer, the more lucrative the ties. “Research studies” are funded by the companies that stand to benefit from positive outcomes with predictable results. In fact, in many cases, senior authors put their names to research they did not conduct and articles written by company ghost writers. To make matters worse, the data of the studies are owned by contract not by the author (as the case used to be) but by the funding organization so results can be manipulated by the funder despite what the did or did not show.

FDA committee and task force members, too, have significant financial ties to industry. Drug related objectivity is, for the most part, in the mind of the beholder since it is not in the bank account of either the journal or the scientist.

Is it any wonder, then, that highly prestigious and [supposedly] objectivemedical journals participate in propagating the on-going poison press designed to wear away America’s allegiance to natural health options?

Our $20 billion per year supplement spending means that people don’t buy as many expensive and dangerous drugs as they would if they were not protecting their health naturally. That is a real problem for the illness care industry since healthy people are bad customers for the illness industry. That means that our supplement habit must be broken for current profits and the future. The Codex agenda is to making nutrients available only at doses so small they have no impact on any human being is to be brought to the US.

You see, the will of the American people and their legislators to keep DSHEA (the 1994 Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act) intact has to be broken, too. DSHEA says that nutrients are considered as foods and, as such, have no upper limit. The Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline says that nutrients are to be considered only in terms of their risk; the WHO guidance on the matter says that ANY CHANGE IN A BIO-MARKER (e.g., anything that can be measured) CAUSED BY A NUTRIENT IS AN ADVERSE EVENT!

The propaganda war is on, big time. Read what Peter Chowka, long time health journalist, has to say about the latest participation by the medical journals.

Saturday, Apr. 15, 2006

Recent Negative Studies of Alternative Medicine:

Bad Medicine or Bad Reporting?

© By Peter Barry Chowka

(April 15, 2006) In recent weeks, the news hasn’t been good for alternative medicine. First came the stories, reported prolifically in the mainstream media, that low-fat diets don’t help to prevent breast or colon cancer or heart disease. This reporting was based on three studies that were published in the February 8, 2006 issue of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association), one of the world’s leading medical journals. That same week, another prestigious scientific publication, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), in its February 9 issue published a study contending that one of the most commonly used herbs, saw palmetto, was no better than placebo for the treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy or enlarged prostate.

That article was the opening salvo in a new, ongoing series of critiques of alternative medicine in the pages of the NEJM. In the February 16 issue, two studies called into question the effectiveness of using vitamin D and calcium to reduce the risks of bone fractures and colorectal cancer – conditions that have been found in previous studies to benefit from calcium and vitamin D supplementation. The following week (the February 23 issue of the NEJM) another study appeared, proclaiming the uselessness of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin for osteoarthritis.

What these negative studies have in common is that the diets or supplements that were being tested have all been previously studied or subjected to review, with consistently positive findings. In fact, a list of the positive studies and references indicating the benefits of low-fat diets, calcium, vitamin D, saw palmetto, glucosamine, and chondroitin sulfate would be quite extensive.

But typically, as soon as the media catch wind of (or read a press release about) a negative study, they tend to exhibit selective amnesia, forgetting or ignoring all of the positive studies that preceded it.

The recent negative studies may have attracted the media’s attention because they appear to go against previously held beliefs – particularly in regard to the presumed benefits of low-fat diets and calcium/vitamin D supplementation. If the results of a new study had indicated instead that low-fat diets prevented heart disease or calcium supplements provided bone protection, they would probably never have made it on the nightly network TV newscasts or in wire service stories. Such news would have been met with a ho-hum, “What else is new?” shrug from most mainstream media producers and editors.

As in the case of any scientific study, however, the published results of these recent negative ones were not as black and white as the media portrayed them to be. The inaccurate or incomplete reporting is partly the result of the limitations of the sound-byte driven news business and also accountable to the somewhat misleading way that the researchers reported the conclusions in several of the studies.

Low-fat Diet Effects on Heart Disease and Cancer

The Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial (which began in 1991), the source of the conclusions in the February 8 JAMA articles, was designed to determine the potential long term effects of a low-fat diet on the risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, and colon cancer in 48,835 postmenopausal women, ages 50-79. The study goal was to decrease total dietary fat to 20% and increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables to five servings daily and whole grains to six servings daily. The dietary intervention group was then compared to a control group of women who were not asked to make dietary changes but who were given diet-related educational materials.

This type of study is problematic for many reasons. In the real world, an individual’s dietary changes are usually made gradually, over a long period of time. In fact, in the JAMA articles, by the sixth year of the study the participants in the low-fat dietary intervention group had only decreased their fat intake by 8.2% and the saturated fat intake (the fat most often associated with heart disease) by only 2.9%. In addition, in the low-fat group there was an average daily increase of only 1.1 servings of fruits and vegetables and 0.5 servings of whole grains. Even with these somewhat subtle dietary changes, however, there was a trend toward decreased heart disease and breast cancer incidence in the study participants who consumed the lowest levels of saturated- and trans-fats and in the ones who ate at least 6.5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily. These positive trends are important since the protective or preventive effects of a low-fat diet can take many years, if not several decades, to be fully realized.

Another significant problem with the negative JAMA studies is that the participants in the dietary-change groups were asked to reduce total dietary fat to 20%. Such a blanket recommendation does not take into account the fact that there are “good fats” and “bad fats.” Thus, this group may have been decreasing heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, such as the ones in salmon and other cold water fish. These same fatty acids have been found in numerous studies to help prevent cancer.

Saw Palmetto and Enlarged Prostate

The New England Journal of Medicine kicked off its latest series of articles on alternative medicine on February 9, 2006 with the publication of a study on the herb saw palmetto for the treatment of enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH). The study’s design looked good, the dosage of saw palmetto seemed appropriate, and the herbal product that was used appeared to be of high quality. The study may have been compromised from the outset, however, by the choice of study participants – men with moderate-to-severe prostate enlargement. Previous studies on saw palmetto have usually looked at men with mild-to-moderate BPH.

The design of the February 9 NEJM study brings to mind an earlier one, published in 2002 in JAMA, on St. John’s wort for moderately severe major depression in which the dosage used was one that had been found in previous studies to benefit people with mild-to-moderate depression. Rather than confirm these findings in a group with milder depression or increase the dose to one that had been noted in clinical reports to benefit people with more severe depression, the researchers used the lower dose and then concluded that St. John’s wort was useless for the treatment of depression. A similar negative conclusion (including the failure to indicate that the study was in men with moderate-to-severe benign prostatic hyperplasia) was drawn by the saw palmetto researchers: “In this study, saw palmetto did not improve symptoms or objective measures of benign prostatic hyperplasia.” This conclusion, of course, is the bottom-line one that was fed to the media, most of whose representatives no doubt did not read or carefully analyze the study itself.

It is not unusual for the conclusions of a medical journal’s article or study, or the press release issued by the publication promoting it, to be negative, while the details of the complete study suggest a more nuanced, inconclusive, or even positive picture.

In the case of the NEJM saw palmetto study, it seems doubtful that men who have found that the herb helps to keep them from having to get up five times a night to urinate will stop taking it because of this single study. But the negative reporting will likely deter others who might have experienced benefits from using this safe and effective herbal alternative.

Calcium and Vitamin D for Decreasing

Fracture Risk and Preventing Colon Cancer

The fact that calcium and vitamin D are important to bone health is fairly well established accepted. Less widely known, but supported by significant positive research, is the fact that both calcium and vitamin D appear to offer protection against certain types of cancer, including colon cancer. Therefore, it was surprising when the news reported that a study in the February 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine had concluded that calcium and vitamin D do not prevent colorectal cancer or bone fractures.

One of the more questionable reports in the print media about the February 16 study was published in The New York Times on February 15. The Times article, “Study Finds Calcium Supplements Don’t Prevent Broken Bones,” opened with the following statement: “Calcium and vitamin D supplements increased the risk of kidney stones but did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer in middle-aged and elderly women, according to an extensive study whose results are to be published Thursday.”

It’s not hard to understand why the media would get it so wrong since the concluding statement in the official abstract of the published study, “Calcium plus Vitamin D Supplementation and the Risk of Fractures,” states: “Among healthy, postmenopausal women, calcium with vitamin D supplementation resulted in a small but significant improvement in hip bone density, did not significantly reduce hip fracture, and increased the risk of kidney stones.”

A closer look at this study reveals that it was also part of the Women’s Health Initiative (described above in the section on the low-fat diet studies). The bone fracture-colon cancer study included 36,282 postmenopausal women, ages 50-79 years. They were randomly assigned to receive either 1,000 mg of calcium in the form of calcium carbonate and 400 IU of vitamin D or placebo pills. The study’s protocol was confusing and the conclusions raised more questions than they answered.

Many of the women (16,089) were also enrolled in the hormone replacement arm of the study, confounding the results because hormone replacement can have a significant effect on bone density. Women in both the calcium/vitamin D group and the placebo group were also allowed to take personal calcium supplements (up to 1,000 mg daily) and vitamin D supplements (up to 600 IU daily - 1,000 IU daily after 1999) outside of the study as well as other medications for bone health.

Despite all of these significant variables, the study resulted in a 12% overall lower rate of hip fracture in the calcium and vitamin D treated group compared with the placebo group. The study’s authors deemed this result to be not statistically significant. However, when the supplement group was analyzed for compliance it was determined that participants in the group who took at least 80% of the assigned supplements had a 29% decrease in hip fractures. A major question is why non-compliers were even included in the final analysis. In addition, when the women were stratified according to age, those age 60 and older – the group most likely to suffer from hip fractures – experienced a 21% decrease in hip fractures, even when the study didn’t remove the non-compliers.

The calcium/vitamin D group had a 17% greater likelihood of kidney stones. While the increase in kidney stone rate was reported widely, none of the positive results reached the attention of the mainstream media, even though the increased likelihood of kidney stones was less than the improvement in the hip fracture prevention rate. It should also be noted that the form of calcium used in the study was calcium carbonate, one of the more poorly absorbed forms of calcium. Had the researchers used a more absorbable form of calcium, for example, calcium citrate, they would probably have gotten better results and even decreased the risk of kidney stones, since citric acid (citrate) has been found to help prevent the most common type of kidney stone.

Since this same group of people was analyzed for the effects of calcium and vitamin D on colorectal cancer, some of the same problems with the study design apply – for instance, the fact that the placebo group was also allowed to take significant amounts of personal vitamin D and calcium. In addition, the study lasted seven years and, due to the length of time it takes for cancers to develop, this may have been too short a period to observe a truly beneficial effect of vitamin D and calcium in preventing cancer – a fact that was acknowledged by the researchers (but not in most media reporting).

Glucosamine and Chondroitin for Arthritis

In the study on glucosamine and chondroitin published in the February 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, these two commonly used nutritional supplements for arthritis were compared to the anti-inflammatory medication celecoxib or to placebo. The study randomly assigned 1,583 people with osteoarthritis of the knee to receive 1,500 mg glucosamine HCl, 1,200 mg chondroitin sulfate, a combination of glucosamine and chondroitin, 200 mg celecoxib, or placebo for 24 weeks. People in all groups were allowed to take up to 4,000 mg acetaminophen (Tylenol) daily if necessary. The groups were further divided according to pain severity with 1,229 in a group with mild pain and 354 in a group with moderate-to-severe pain.

The study design was reasonable, although one might ask why glucosamine HCl was used, rather than glucosamine sulfate, since the majority of positive studies of glucosamine for arthritis used the sulfate form. The results reported by the researchers seemed accurate and relatively unbiased, and included the following conclusions: “Glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate alone or in combination did not reduce pain effectively in the overall group of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. Exploratory analyses suggest that the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate may be effective in the subgroup of patients with moderate-to-severe knee pain.”

In fact, the combination supplement was significantly effective in the group of participants that needed it most – the ones with the most severe pain. On the scales used to analyze benefit, those taking the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin experienced significant benefit – 24.9 percentage points higher than placebo. This improvement was compared to the effects observed in the group taking the anti-inflammatory drug celecoxib that resulted in only 15.1 percentage points improvement over placebo. Yet, the mainstream media reportage on this study was simply that glucosamine and chondroitin don’t work for arthritis. There was no mention that it does work in those who need it most or that celecoxib may not work so well, either.

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Nutrients are Bad For Your Health? Nonsense

April 1st, 2006

Recently the Wall Street Journal published the most outrageous print attack yet on your health and mine. This ordinarily respected newspaper chose to tout highly questionable science to tell us that vitamins pose dangers to our health and chances of survival. BALDERDASH

I hope that the article that follows will spur you to take vitamins and minerals to protect your health and well being. Please be aware that the level of under nutrition which follows from bad science like this and treating vitamins and minerals as dangers the way the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline does, is the best way I know of to insure that you will develop otherwise preventable serious diseases, get sick and stay that way. The propaganda machine is working hard to convince you that nutrients are somehow bad for you. This is part of the effort to soften you up to accept a “harmonized” approach to Codex. That way, when you can’t get effective nutrients you won’t miss them because the big lie (”Nutrients are dangerous since they cause changes in the human body”) has become the way most people have been trained to view things. Those who lament their loss will be marginalized by mass media propaganda pieces like the one in the Wall Street Journal. Never mind that they are based on bad (or no) science. They are part of a magnificently orchestrated campaign to make optimal nutrition (which I believe requires nutrient supplementation in a toxic world) a non-option for you and your family.

Just as I was sitting down to write a response to this poppycock, I received an email which contained an excellent summary of why this is bad science and very, very poor public policy. This article was written by Jean Carper and forwarded to me by Elwood Richard, a long time supporter of health and health freedom.

I include the complete article here: it is well worth reading and sharing with your friends and those in your circle of influence.

Special Report : The media strikes again

A report in the Wall Street Journal unfairly attacks vitamins as doing more harm than good, adding more fuel to the vitamin wars and getting many facts wrong. Here’s the real truth.

http://www.stopagingnow.com/pages/specialreport/wsj

The WSJ’s Fictitious “Case Against Vitamins”

By Jean Carper

Vitamin opponents’ efforts to steer you away from supplements have taken a frightening new direction. Attacks on vitamins are escalating from allegations of merely “useless” to “extremely dangerous.” This alarming message is central to “The Case Against Vitamins,” in the Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2006. The subhead sets the tone: “Recent studies show that many vitamins not only don’t help. They may actually cause harm.”

Should you throw away your vitamins? No. In assembling its “case,” to scare people away from vitamins, the WSJ said much that is not scientifically accepted and left much unsaid. It cites carefully selected and sometimes outdated studies without proper perspective; misses or omits studies that contradict the premise, and fails to give a fair analysis by respected vitamin experts, choosing instead, sources of lesser expertise, credibility and credentials. Whether the bias is careless or reflects a mindset friendly to extensive pharmaceutical advertising, is impossible to tell.

Here’s how the Wall Street Journal got it completely wrong about vitamins E, A and C, on which they based the major part of their “case.”

Vitamin E in Wonderland

You might suspect the fix is in when the first person quoted by the WSJ is cardiologist Edgar R. Miller, author of one of the most criticized and denounced studies ever done on vitamin E. Eminent vitamin E researchers called his analysis, claiming common doses of vitamin E boosted death rates 4% to 6%, a case study in the misuse of statistics with laughable conclusions. If it were true, this absurd conclusion means taking vitamin E is more deadly than smoking, points out Jeffrey Blumberg, chief of antioxidant research at Tufts University. Dr. Blumberg and other vitamin E luminaries were so appalled, they signed a full page ad that ran in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, denouncing Miller’s assertions that vitamin E was unsafe.

Dr. Blumberg also teamed up with 12 other international authorities to refute that vitamin E is unsafe at doses under 1600 IU a day, in the April, 2005 issue of the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Among those condeming Miller’s conclusions are world-renowned antioxidant and vitamin E researchers, Lester Packer PhD, University of Southern California, and Maret Traber, PhD, Oregon State University and authority on vitamin E toxicity for the National Academy of Sciences. NIH’s head of alternative and complementary medicine also told me he didn’t believe the study.

Miller’s study, in fact, was exposed as bogus soon after it came out, its credibility destroyed by a major NIH study that found NO serious adverse effects, let alone death, in 40,000 women who took 600 IU of vitamin E every other day for ten years! If vitamin E was harmful or deadly, it surely would have shown up in this largest, longest vitamin E test ever done. Such a massive clinical trial overwhelmingly trumps previous studies like Miller’s, and is irrefutable testimony to the utter safety of vitamin E at common doses, says Dr. Traber.

More remarkable, contrary to Miller’s false predictions of death from vitamin E, the NIH study revealed it as an astonishing lifesaver. “It’s the most exciting findings about vitamin E in 10 years!” said Dr. Traber.

The truth is heart deaths dropped 24% in women who took vitamin E. And it gets better. In women 65 and over, prime targets of heart attacks, vitamin E slashed death rates an incredible 49%–nearly in half!, the NIH study showed. This means taking vitamin E might save over 200,000 women a year from heart disease deaths, figures Dr. Traber.

Imagine. If a drug did that, it would be heralded as a miracle cure; doctors would wildly prescribe it, and its stock would soar, says Traber. But without huge drug money behind it, vitamin E is unfairly trashed as dangerous by the press and blacklisted by doctors, all to the detriment of people who could benefit greatly from it.

The Vitamin A Tales:

After repeating the widely-published hazards of high doses of beta carotene for current smokers, the WSJ “Case Against Vitamins,” takes on vitamin A as cause of hip fractures, citing a 2002 Harvard nurses’ study, that “associated” high vitamin A from foods, multivitamins and supplements, with a 48% higher risk for hip fractures. It is naive to use this study to slam supplements, since the greatest vitamin A threat came from consuming too much liver, not supplements. Nor was vitamin A a fracture hazard to women on estrogen, suggesting more complex factors than vitamin A.

Nor is the Harvard indictment of vitamin A the last word on the issue. Much research contradicts it. A 2004 large-scale, 9.5-year study of 34,703 postmenopausal women by the University of Minnesota, cleared vitamin A, in both supplements and food, of promoting fractures. Specifically researchers made clear there was “no evidence” that women who took the highest doses of vitamin A supplements were most apt to break a hip. (Lim LS, Osteoporos Int, 2004 Jul;15(7):552-9)

Most important, better-designed studies overshadow and refute the 4-year-old Harvard study that the WSJ relied on to build its anti-vitamin A case, and even suggest the opposite: that higher vitamin A, surprisingly, may also be tied to fewer fractures.

The difference comes from the way the study is designed. More current sophisticated research compares an individual’s actual blood level of vitamin A with his or her bone density and fracture history. The Harvard study simply asked women what foods they ate, then estimated their vitamin A intake based on food-nutrient tables, and compared this with the number of fractures in the women. Obviously, this is a crude and unreliable measure of vitamin A status, compared with actual blood tests.

In several studies using blood tests, the vitamin A threat disappears or is turned upside down. At least, three recent studies that sampled blood for vitamin A content, either find no bone-hazard from vitamin A–or a LOWER risk of fractures.

British researchers at the University of Sheffield, scrutinized the blood of some 1200 women over age 75, searching for evidence that vitamin A induced fractures. No such thing. Women with the highest blood levels of vitamin A were 15% LESS apt to suffer a fracture of any bone, including the hip, than those with the lowest blood vitamin A. Women taking multivitamins (including vitamin A) or vitamin-A-dense cod liver oil were even better off–24% less apt to break a bone. (Barker ME, J Bone Miner Res.2005 Jun;20 (6):913-20.

At New York’s Columbia University, a similar 22-year long study of 2799 American women ages 50 to 74, found that fracture risk nearly doubled in women with both the lowest and highest blood concentrations of vitamin A, adding more confusion and controversy to the debate. (Opotowsky AR, Am J Med 2004 Aug 1;117(3): 169-74)

In a side note, a recent Italian study showed that women with osteoporosis had lower blood levels of vitamin A, as well as vitamin C and E, suggesting lower antioxidant defenses against free radical damage may be involved in bone destruction and accelerated aging. (Maggio D.,J clin Endocrinol Metab 2003 Apr;88(4):1523-7).

Bottom Line: The issue of vitamin A and bones is unsettled and highly debatable. The evidence is conflicting and confusing. The WSJ’s black and white “Case Against Vitamins,” gave no indication of this. It presented vitamin A as a bone-hazard, case closed, hyping a fear of vitamin A among readers, when that is not an accepted scientific finding by any stretch. The jury is still out, and it could go several ways.

Vitamin C as Villain? Amazing

“Like other vitamin studies, research into vitamin C has been disappointing,” recites the WSJ’s Case Against Vitamins” saying it might not prevent colds or fight cancer, as Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling promised it would 30 years ago. To press the point further, the WSJ article resurrects studies, asserting vitamin C can promote cancer and even death.

On the contrary, a new Japanese study says taking 500 mg of vitamin C daily cut odds of getting three or more colds over 5 years by 66%.

But that’s of small consequence compared with dazzling new research identifying vitamin C as a promising new cancer drug. Excitement over the anticancer properties of vitamin C is dramatically escalating, rather than diminishing, among top-drawer scientists. It’s hard to fathom how the Wall Street Journal missed this fact, since a quick search turns up dozens of studies of vitamin C’s remarkable abilities to stop cancer.

Far from encouraging cancer growth, as the Wall Street Journal’s outdated information asserted, vitamin C selectively targets and kills cancer cells, leaving normal cells unharmed, says groundbreaking research by Mark Levine, MD at the National Institutes of Health. High doses of vitamin C rapidly killed 100% of human lymphoma cells, reports Levine, as well as 9 other cancer cells, including breast, ovarian, lung, kidney and colon.

Moreover, Levine notes that some doctors already give high- dose intravenous vitamin C to help stop cancer. The evidence for increased survival and safety is so impressive, even in advanced late-stage cancer, that Levine has called for a “re-evaluation of vitamin C as cancer therapy.”

Levine explains that for years researchers missed Pauling’s point and failed to understand precisely how vitamin C destroys cancer cells and why very high doses are needed. In original studies, Pauling administered 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day intravenously to terminal cancer patients for about 10 days, and then high oral doses of C afterward. Those on vitamin C improved and survived longer. When Mayo Clinic researchers set out to verify Pauling’s findings, they gave high oral doses, not intravenous doses, and concluded it didn’t work. However, it is impossible, Levine notes, to raise vitamin C blood levels to cancer-lethal doses orally. The vitamin C vanishes too quickly. Doses deadly to cancer cells can be achieved only intravenously by jacking up blood levels of vitamin C 25 times higher than oral doses do.

For example, doctors at the University of Kansas gave two women with stage 3 ovarian carcinoma 60,000 mg of vitamin C intravenously twice a week, as well as conventional chemotherapy. Their tumors vanished and they showed no signs of cancer 3 1/2 years later. The doctors are now conducting a randomized test of high vitamin C (and other antioxidants) along with chemotherapy in women newly diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

More amazing: Dr. Levine and NIH colleagues personally documented three cases of advanced cancer in which vitamin C shrank tumors, dramatically increasing survival.

• A 49-year-old man diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer in 1996 declined chemotherapy in favor of high-dose vitamin C infusions. Nine years later he is alive and cancer-free.

• A 66-year-old woman with an aggressive lymphoma and a “dismal prognosis” in 1995, also rejected chemotherapy, but had radiation, and intravenous high-dose vitamin C. She, too is alive 10 years later.

• A 51-year-old woman with kidney cancer that had spread to her lungs, opted for alternative therapy, including high-dose intravenous vitamin C given twice weekly for 10 months. Two months later, scans showed the tumors were gone. Her cancer remained in remission for four years. A smoker, she died of lung cancer that did not respond to the same therapy.

The Wall Street Journal is correct in saying that many doctors oppose use of antioxidants, including vitamin C, during chemotherapy, fearing interference with treatment. But experts point out the idea is only “theoretical,” and has no evidence to justify it. The WSJ assertion that antioxidants may “promote some cancer and interfere with treatments,” is without scientific merit. The one study that tested the theory found no difference in outcome–and certainly no worsening from antioxidants.

The latest evidence from the top experts at the National Institutes of Health not only rebuts the fictitious danger of vitamins to cancer patients, but shows that antioxidants, notably vitamin C, have the power to shrink cancer, produce remissions and dramatically extend life of even advanced cancer patients. Although it is still unclear how effective lower doses of vitamin C may be in preventing or fighting cancer, it is implausible that they could be harmful, considering that massive doses are not and, in fact, are so beneficial.

Should we hold our collective breath for the WSJ to do a major story on the ascent of vitamin C as a potentially powerful, inexpensive and incredibly safe cancer “drug?” Imagine the impact of that on pharmaceutical profits.

< < END

In the US we have a precious (and much attacked) law called DSHEA (the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act passed in 1994) which holds that nutrients are foods and, as such, can have no upper limits set upon them. Codex holds the opposit: the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline says that nutrients should have upper limits assessed by Risk Assessment, a technique designed to determine just how high a toxic dose can be before it produces changes in your body and then set limits 100 lower than that.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently produced a Workshop document to help [sic] Codex with the application of Risk Assessment to nutrients. This document defines an

adverse event

as ANY change in ANYTHING that can be measured in a human (a biomarker). So any change, whether positive or negative, which is brought about by a nutrient is an adverse event under Codex!

What to do? Several things.

First, inform yourself. Make sure you watch “Nutricide: the DVD” and tell your friends about it or arrange a public showing in your church, club or school. Download a copy of the highly informative Codex e-Book which was presented to decision makers in Africa last month. It contains a wealth of information on the solution to the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and an in-depth essay on nutritional medicine you need.

Second, take action. Sign the Citizens Petition and join the thousands of others who are challenging the US Government’s Codex policy. Then “Ride the Freedom Mouse” to let Congress know that your health and health freedom is really important to you.

Oh, yes, one more action step: send a letter to the FDA and one to Congress to prevent Wyeth from smashing the competition that natural molecules offer to toxic synthetic hormones. You see, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (which makes Premarin and Prempro) is attempting to pressure the FDA to ban its competitors, Bio-Identical Hormones. Premarin (synthetic estrogen made from pregnant mares urine) and Prempro (the synthetic estrogen plus synthetic progesterone called “progestin”) are so toxic that a National Institutes of Health drug trial using these two hormones which involved 168,000 menopausal women was halted early (2002) to protect women from the increased risks of heart disease, breast cancer, blood clots, blindness and strokes which they carry with them although they have no clinical benefit whatsoever.

Millions of women got the message and switched to safe, natural hormones which do protect them but don’t carry the risks of the synthetic hormones. Now, four years later, Wyeth has hijacked the Citizens Petition process to work its corporate magic: wave a wand and take away safe, inexpensive options leaving only dangerous, expensive drugs.

Hmmm. Sounds a lot like Codex to me.

Not happy with this turn of events? Support the Natural Solutions Foundation with your contribution or monthly pledge (donate $50 or more and we will send you a letter for your tax records stating the contribution is tax deductible).

Thanks. Your activism is essential to our success.

Yours in health and freedom,

Dr. Laibow