Un-Health and the Crisis of Modern Civilization

By James J. Gormley

The modern healthcare crisis is a modern crisis in health, first and foremost, before we even get to access to the question of “care.”

To put this point in perspective, let’s take a step back to late 2010, when British researchers published their examination of nearly 1,000 mummies from ancient Egypt and South America. They found that only a few of these ancients suffered from cancer before they died.

The findings suggest that cancer is not a naturally occurring condition and that modern lifestyles and industrial pollution are the main cause of the 33 percent cancer rate seen in the industrialized world today.

In an October 2010 article in England’s The Telegraph, Dr. Rosalie David, a biomedical Egyptologist said that in ancient times, cancer was extremely rare. “There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer, “ said David. “So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle—cancer appears to be a modern disease created by modern life.”

Since the life expectancy of people in the ancient world was between 25 and 40, we might attribute the low incidence of cancer to the abbreviated lifespan — for example, if certain cancers take 25 to 30 years to develop then it would be expected that the incidence of cancer would be low. That might have held water except for the fact that the main reason the life expectancy estimates were so low was because the infant mortality rates were so high: as high as 30 to 40 percent.

The Discouraging News in 2011

It is known that breast, prostate and colorectal cancers are increased in certain societies, such as the U.S., and it is believed that this is partly due to the fast food consumption in this country in comparison with diets rich in fiber, seafood, lean meat, vegetables and fruit.

In the U.S., breast cancer hit about 208,000 women last year, and it was estimated that 39,840 women would die from it. Colorectal cancer, which is perhaps the type of disease most closely linked to dietary choices, killed 51,370 people in 2010. In terms of incidence, there were 101,700 new cases of colon cancer last year and 39,510 new cases of rectal cancer.

Smoking is linked to cancers of the lung, bladder, mouth, colon, kidney, throat, voice box, esophagus, lip, stomach, cervix, liver and pancreas.

In terms of lung cancer, there were 222,520 new cases in 2010 and approximately 157,300 deaths, making lung cancer the leading cause of cancer death by far, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all deaths from cancer.

In terms of cancers with a strong environmental/industrial exposure component, while asbestos is linked primarily to lung cancer, exposure to benzidine (a chemical found in certain dyes) is mainly associated with bladder cancer.

Diabetes, Heart Disease and the Quality of Life Killers
Moving outside the realm of cancer, type 2 diabetes, of course, is largely caused by lifestyle choices, such as diet and physical activity. Type 2 diabetes, in which the body gradually loses its ability to use and produce insulin, accounts for 90 to 95 percent of cases.

Although diabetes kills less people, nearly 26 million Americans (or nearly 8 percent of the population) have diabetes and 79 million people have pre-diabetes. People with diabetes can experience numerous serious and deadly complications, including heart disease and stroke, blindness, chronic kidney disease, and amputations.

The no. 1 killer, of course, is heart disease. Clocking in at 26.8 million non-institutionalized people with diagnosed heart disease, heart disease kills 616,067 people each year.

What makes matters even worse, 33 percent of adults have hypertension and 15 percent have high cholesterol. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Add these factors together, and stroke may be in the picture, which by itself strikes down 135,952 people a year.

Quality of Life Indicators
And the discouraging news is not only about killer diseases; it’s also about conditions that impact our quality of life, that hobble us with all of the pains and aches that can make living feel like a torture.

Arthritis is one such quality-of-life killer, one which is diagnosed in 52.1 million people. Other critical, life-impacting conditions and areas for concern are: osteoporosis (including hip fractures); osteoarthritis and joint pain; and cognitive decline (including memory loss).

The Encouraging News in 2011
According to the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), as many as two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to environmental causes and have some (or many) risk factors or exposures that can be modified or prevented, respectively.

Environmental factors include: radiation and industrial exposure (e.g., asbestos and pesticides). Lifestyle factors include: cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, poor diet, lack of exercise, excessive sunlight exposure, and social behaviors that increase exposure to certain viruses (e.g., HPV).

Research bears out the fact that nutritional supplements can provide powerful support in any effort to address the lifestyle part of the risk factors for the diseases of aging.

B Vitamins
In April 2010, Japanese researchers published a landmark study in the journal, Stroke, which examined data from 23,119 men and 35,611 women between the ages of 40 and 79.

After 14 years of follow up, it was found that men who had higher consumption of folic acid and vitamin B-6 experienced significantly fewer deaths from heart failure. Women who consumed higher levels of B vitamins experienced fewer deaths from stroke, heart disease and total cardiovascular death.

Calcium and Vitamin D
A wide body of scientific research supports the use of supplements to prevent fractures, especially hip fractures, in older people. A 2011 review in the journal, Metabolism, confirmed this: “Combined therapy, with calcium and vitamin D, has been shown to reduce hip fracture risk,” especially in frail elderly patients.

Glucosamine and Chondroitin
A two-year follow-up on the GAIT study of glucosamine, chrondroitin sulfate, their combination and the arthritis drug, Celebrex, published in 2010, carried forward the 2008 findings that showed glucosamine provided beneficial effects in knee pain and mobility.

Memory and Cognitive Function
Anyone who has a family member who seems to be overly forgetful, or who may be struggling with signs of age-related cognitive decline, should be familiar with a recent study published in the journal, Alzheimer’s and Dementia, which provides yet additional evidence that older adults who took 900 mg supplements of purified DHA (an omega-3 marine oil) for six months experienced improved memory and overall brain health.

Gormley Take-Away? While politicians and healthcare policy experts debate how best to fix our nation’s healthcare mess, if we focus on health, including responsible self-care using diet, exercise and judicious nutritional supplementation, the mammoth healthcare structure that is built may very well wind up with a significant number of empty beds that were supposed to have patients on them. This is something to work towards, to be sure: a medical complex in search of patients!

The Food Safety Law: The Way Forward

By James J. Gormley

The biggest food-industry-related issue of the 2009-2010 Congress was S. 510/HR 2751, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA or Public Law 111-353).

Advocacy and political positioning on the FSMA exemplified both successes that can be achieved via industry-consumer collaboration and yet, ultimately, likewise the failure of such a collaboration to achieve more than the political version of NIMBY (not in my back yard) accomplishments.

What trade groups failed to realize:

1. While the FSMA does provide some improved food-safety system measures, its over-reliance on recordkeeping and documentation that features a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) algorithmic/risk-based approach to food safety, and an under-reliance on on-site physical inspections, does nothing to address the core problems in this country’s food-safety system: filthy factory farms and disgusting slaughterhouses.
2. While these groups are patting each other on the back for being representatives of the regulated industry that have a “seat at the table,” their members’ raw material suppliers are being saddled with a dizzyingly complex and expensive system of paperwork and systems, onerous requirements whose impact is already being felt by companies that are attempting to be forward-compliant.
3. If the FDA abuses its now expanded powers, legitimate manufacturers (and classes of products) will be swept up in its allegations of adulteration, contamination and misbranding.
4. The organic trade groups will regret their effusive praise if raw milk and raw milk cheeses (a cottage industry and gourmet food segment) are taken off the market.
5. Although all trade groups claim that consumer benefit and consumer safety are at the very core of everything they support, including this law, they disregarded the fact that consumer health freedom organizations — groups which truly represent consumer interests — were completely opposed to S. 510 and HR 2751 and that tens of thousands of letters were sent to Congress demanding that this bill not pass in its current form (this is on top of over 20,000 letters to the White House calling for its veto).

Regardless, once trade groups and some conservative consumer groups saw that farms and dietary supplement finished products were ostensibly excluded from HR 2751, most parties claimed victory and applauded the bill’s passage despite the fact that very troubling provisions remain in the law, such as:

Reasonable probability and reasonable belief: According to Section 423, if there is a “reasonable probability” that an article of food is adulterated under section 402 or misbranded under section 403, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will offer the manufacturer an “opportunity to cease distribution and recall such article.”

DANGER: The FDA has often called products misbranded based on the flimsiest of bases; it has also challenged the GRAS status of certain ingredients (or the data behind NDI filings) as a back-door attempt to go after certain combination supplements. The FDA has also made clear its regulatory animus regarding raw milk products (milk, cheeses). The FDA could very well attempt to use its expanded recall authority to effectively go on a “witch hunt” against certain products or classes or products that it cannot hurt through existing law.

Section 113 (new dietary ingredients) re anabolic steroids: One example of where dietary supplements were not totally excluded from HR 2751 is Section 113, wherein there is a proviso to notify the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) if dietary supplements contain anabolic steroids, which could be excellent if judiciously applied — this was something I am pleased to note that I personally created a campaign on via Citizens for Health and various calls to action.
POTENTIAL DANGER: Nevertheless, the FDA merely needs to suspect that a supplement “may contain” an anabolic steroid or anabolic steroid analogue in order to refer a dietary supplement for DEA enforcement, which does open the door to potential targeting of legitimate manufacturers along with the fly-by-night operators.

Section 207. Administrative detention of food. In the final version of HR 2751, “credible evidence” was changed to “reason to believe” for suspected adulterated or contaminated food to be quarantined.

DANGER: Now the FDA does not even need credible evidence in order to impound food; all the agency needs to have is a gut feeling that food is dangerous, and it can be quarantined. While this might help in cases of intentional poisoning of the food supply, it does provide the FDA a great deal of additional discretionary authority.

Section 404. Compliance with International Agreements. Nothing in this act (or an amendment made by this act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) or any other treaty or international agreement to which the U.S. is a party (e.g., General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT], NAFTA, the Uruguay Rounds, Codex).

DANGER: This is dangerous ground even if it was intended as a pro forma thruway. As an example of unintended, sovereignty-endangering consequences of nations including such language, one commentator claims that in Canada’s new Bill C-36, Health Canada has proposed that the powers provided to Parliament should be forfeited so that Canada can “honor its international agreements and commitments”! The FDA has not provided any explanation, much less a good reason, as to why sovereign U.S. domestic laws and regulations would need to be consistent, or not inconsistent, with international treaties and agreements.

Section 420. Limited distribution. “In the interest of national security, the Secretary of HHS, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, may determine the time, manner and form in which the guidance documents […] are made public, including by releasing such documents to targeted audiences.”

DANGER: If the U.S. government does not care to release the very instructions and guidance needed by suppliers and producers in order to properly comply with the requirements, the government does not have to, if cloaked under the usual catch-all blanket of “national security.” Obviously, in this way many food producers would likely fail if the requirements (and related compliance guidance) are a secret until inspection. This is similar to a teacher handing you a graded final exam despite the fact that you were denied the course, the textbook, the studying and the very exam questions themselves. Talk about setting food producer and ingredient suppliers up for failure!

The FSMA’s fate
Passage of this bill won’t change much unless the bill is funded. In this economic environment, it will be difficult to get the $1.4 billion required to implement this bill without some revenue generator, which this bill does not include. There has already been talk from Republicans in the House that they will not fund the bill. The government is currently under a continuing resolution (CR) which expires on March 4. So one of the first challenges for the new Congress is how they handle the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Therefore, it is unlikely that anyone will get an increase in this environment. Some lobbying from states is also anticipated since they’ll be able to seek a variance from the produce safety standards as long as they can show that they have procedures in place to reach the same goals.

The way forward

Effective health-freedom advocacy in 112th Congress. On the good side, the Republican-controlled House bodes well for anti-big-government, anti-big-spending, fiscally conservative efforts, including efforts to de-fund “Obamacare” (which will encounter stiff opposition in the Senate) and the FSMA (which is winnable).

One thing to keep in mind: Many old-school, good government Democrats vote anti-supplement because they honestly believe that, in so doing, they are protecting consumers. Some of the anti-supplement co-sponsors are also anti-GMO.

Therefore, approaches to the good-government Dems (called goo-goos) should not attack them as being anti-supplement but should, instead, make it clear that most measures which hurt consumer access to supplements and supplement information also hurts consumers themselves. We must drive home one of Benjamin Franklin’s many truths:

“The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.”

In the land of real women

By James J. Gormley

Although winter has much of the U.S. in its icy grip, many Americans like going to Florida or other sunny climes in February and especially in March, when Spring Break is upon us. With sun-kissed beaches come the tiny, itsy bitsy polka dot bikinis with which sandy diversions are often associated. Many young women (not to mention, lots of men) are alternately looking at the calendar and peeking at the mirror, worried that they will not be able to fit into that swimsuit that’s two sizes too small that was bought as an “incentive” after New Year’s Eve.

What’s with all of this bikini anxiety? As I pointed out in 1999, in an article called “Giving Barbie the ‘Boot”: (1) real women have different body types than do most fashion models, who are often emaciated and (2) typical diets don’t work. In addition, the Barbie body-myth acculturation is now beginning in very young girls who should, arguably, be excited about many things -- such as science, math, sports, and jump-rope -- but not about losing weight!

Rachel Caplin, author of I’m Beautiful, Dammit! Waging Your Own Curvolution and co-founder of Curvolution, a Calif.-based entertainment company that’s working to put real women, of all sizes, into the media, said in a 2006 interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “The fact that it’s bathing suit season doesn’t mean that this is the moment in time where you have to be what the season is telling you to be.”

Our society’s bathing suit obsession becomes even clearer when we look at a few stats on women, girls, and weight extracted from the book, The 7 Secrets of Slim People, by Vikki Hansen, M.S.W., and Shawn Goodman:

• The average American woman is 5'4", weighs 140 lbs., and wears a size 14 dress.
• 33% of American women wear a size 16 or larger.
• 50% of American women are on a diet at any one time.
• 90 to 99% of diets fail to achieve permanent weight loss.
• 50% of 9-year-old girls and 80% of 10-year-old girls have dieted.
• 90% of high-school junior and senior girls diet regularly, even though only between 10-15% are over the "recommended" weight.

And when I learned from authors Hansen and Goodman, that “young girls are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer, and losing their parents,” then it makes me more determined than ever to try to encourage my (trim) teenaged daughter to enjoy her summer and not get sucked into the dysfunctional body-type vortex that surrounds us.

Adding to bikini anxiety is its kissing cousin, fitness anxiety: Are we buff enough? Although we can sometimes feel stress as we unfairly judge ourselves by looking at the aerobics instructor next to us on the StairMaster®, we might not be aware that many everyday activities --- including shopping at the mall! --- really help us to be more fit and burn more calories each day.

For example, did you know that 25 minutes of brisk walking at the mall (the best way to avoid buying too much!) or 30 minutes of washing windows burn the same amount of calories as 20 minutes of medium aerobics or 20 minutes of tennis? Better yet: did you know that 30 minutes of mowing the lawn (although be careful in the heat) or 45 minutes of washing dishes offer the same calorie-burning as the aerobics? All true. That’s what I call putting things in perspective.

So what if it gives us another excuse to go to the mall!

Why Obama Care Needs to Be Repealed

By Jane M. Orient, M.D.
Guest contributor

The plight of people who lose their insurance and then get sick is one of the most appealing arguments for health care reform. And the White House really took advantage of it, soliciting tear-jerking stories from responsible folks who played by the rules and who can’t get insurance through no fault of their own.

The disagreeable truth—a relentless law of economics—is that you can’t insure a pre-existing. If you wreck your car, State Farm pays only if you had the insurance policy before the accident. If you don’t have insurance, your options are to take the bus, walk, ride a bicycle, get help from friends or family, or come up with money to buy a new car from some source other than a car insurance company.


People would very much like the “right” to buy insurance that would cover their pre-existings, without restrictions or waiting periods. But the same folks don’t much like the idea of paying for other people’s pre-existings—or even for their sicknesses. So the healthy ones often switch into a new policy that gives them an enticing low rate if they pass the underwriting. Then those who can’t switch see their premiums go up rapidly. This is called the “death spiral.” Is it the wicked insurance companies’ fault? Or human nature?

You might naturally feel sympathy toward a person who finds out that he has a costly and fatal condition like AIDS. But what if he doesn’t tell the life insurance company about the pre-existing as he buys a million-dollar policy for the benefit of his partner? Is it wicked of the insurer to rescind the policy because of fraud? Or should the government force the company to pay—until it goes bankrupt, and leaves all of its subscribers without coverage?

If you have insurance through your employer, pre-existings are likely not a problem—if you can get the job, that is. But the huge drawback of employer-owned insurance is that you lose it if you lose your job. This is called “job lock.” Lots of people are stuck in jobs they hate because of this.

It might not seem fair that people who pay into a policy for years or decades are left with nothing the instant the policy lapses. But that is the nature of an insurance contract.

If over 10 years or so, you put $100,000 into a safe investment, at the end of that time you have $100,000 plus interest. If instead you hand the money over to the insurance cartel, you have nothing. The trade-off is that if you have a catastrophic event during the time you are covered, the insurer pays. Most people think the deal is a fair one, and that’s why they voluntarily pay the premiums.

As soon as the government forces people to pay a premium for other people’s pre-existings, they are likely to object to what they—quite reasonably—see as a rip-off. Hence the need for more force: the individual mandate.

Some people don’t see the connection, and think we can keep that popular provision on pre-existings, and delete the rest. We can’t.

The long-term answer to the problem of pre-existings is to break the connection between health insurance and employment, which requires changing the tax code provision that caused it. People can pay medical costs with pre-tax dollars if and only if they pay with employer-owned insurance. If they pay out of pocket or through individual policies, they must use after-tax dollars. With payroll tax and income taxes, that means they pay about twice as much. How can that be fair?

People tend to have much longer relationships with groups other than their employer: churches, credit unions, or fraternal organizations, for example. Why can’t they get group health insurance in that way? This type of group policy could offer advantageous guaranteed renewability to keep healthy people in the program.

And why should people get a huge tax advantage if and only if they funnel payments through a third party?

Meanwhile, there are people who have problems now. And there is a solution that already works, without the system-wide destruction of ObamaCare. Many states have high-risk pools for the uninsurable. In Colorado, the monthly premium for a 35-year-old man with income under $50,000 is about $204, around $50 higher than premiums in the regular market. In New Jersey, with guaranteed issue/community rating like that in ObamaCare, the regular monthly premium is $2,150.

Forcing insurers to cover pre-existings without allowing enormous premium increases will bankrupt them. Perhaps driving private insurers out of business is the real agenda. However, imposing a “solution” that multiplies costs bankrupts everybody.

Those who are counting on that single payer hovering in the background need to remember that the government is already bankrupt—a very dangerous pre-existing condition.

The most popular provision of ObamaCare may also be the worst. The whole Act needs to be repealed.

About the Author
Doctor Orient is the Executive Director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and has been in solo practice of general internal medicine since 1981. She is a clinical lecturer in medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is the author of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis, the fourth edition of which has just been published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins. She also authored YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Health Care, published by Crown. She is the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a voice for patients’ and physicians’ independence since 1943. Complete curriculum vitae posted at http://www.drjaneorient.com/. Additional information on health-related issues: http://www.aapsonline.org/ and http://www.takebackmedicine.com

Eeek! Snakes on a Plate!

How the Latest Health “Solutions” Are Like a Comedy Turned Scary!
By James J. Gormley
When I was a kid, one of my “absolute favorite” movies was Stanley Kramer’s madcap 1973 comedy, It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

When I first saw it on CBS in 1978, I loved the antic chaos, the slapstick stunts and the total zaniness of the movie --- hard to not be a sillifest when you have the likes of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters, to name only a few of the comedic greats who graced the celluloid of this film.

What does this have to do with health freedom or health politics? Well, unfortunately: plenty.

In fact, America seems to be in the midst of an unprecedented convergence of varied and sundry strange health “solutions” that are no less wacky than Kramer’s cinematic masterpiece but, unfortunately, not funny … and also rather horrific.

Here are a couple of the latest “strange but true” ideas that would be laughable if they weren’t attracting widespread media attention --and even some supporters!

Food from cloned cattle or cloned meat grown in vats
According to Spence Cooper in a blog post on FriendsEAT.com:  “Recent news reports indicate some U.S. cloned cattle have been created from the cells of dead animals […] And since the U.S. approved cloning over two years ago, you may have already grilled a cloned steak this summer from beef cells extracted from a dead carcass.”

Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January 2008, the alleged purpose of using the technology would be to improve the taste or “quality” of meat and milk that we all consume every day. Because of the cost of cloned cows ($15-20,000 a cow), it is predicted that the offspring of cloned animals will be used (or consumed), not the clones themselves.

Small consolation that. When even the farmers are against something like this, you know it must be really bad. In a written statement at the time, the National Farmers Union said: “Consumers have the right to know if the food they feed their families comes from a cloned animal.”

In addition to ethics, the “right to know” is really what it boils down to: labeling and for consumers being able to make informed choices as to whether they are buying food from clones, cloned offspring, GMOs or what have you, although labeling will most likely not be required.

As I wrote in a Nutrition Industry Executive article, in December 2006, entitled “The FDA’s Strange New World,” the FDA had begun campaigning for cloned animals as early as 2001. In the January-February 2001 issue of FDA Consumer, an FDA writer enthused: “Transgenics can turn animals, such as cows, sheep and goats, into pharmaceutical factories.” Gee, isn’t that a reassuring dream?

“Should there be any limits as to how far we as a species can go in manipulating the fabric of life?” I asked in Better Nutrition magazine back in October 1997. “Or should we, like Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s nightmare, proceed with the ultimate arrogance that nature is not only up for our unlimited exploitation but for our boundless tinkering, as well?”

Statins with that burger?
In a paper that ran in The American Journal of Cardiology,   Dr. Darrel Francis and colleagues from Imperial College London (U.K.) suggest that giving out statin drugs to people at fast-food restaurants will help reduce heart disease risks caused by the fat-drenched meals.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF), which funded the study, is none too pleased with the suggestion of the “MacStatin” that the authors propose. In a BHF blog post by Dr. Mike Knapton, the foundation says:

“Promoting a pill for junk food would lead us towards medicalizing a huge swath of our population when really people need to take more responsibility for their own health.”

 

In the Cardiology article, the authors write: “We envisage a future in which fast food restaurants encourage a holistic approach to healthy eating. On ordering an unhealthy meal, the food will arrive labeled with a warning message […] and on the tray, next to the ketchup, will be a new and protective packet, ‘MacStatin,’ which could be sprinkled onto a Quarter Pounder or into a milkshake.”

Indeed.

If that represents a “holistic approach,” then I imagine the authors have a bridge to sell me, or to themselves.

Gormley Take-Away: I envisage a future in which food is food --- not grown in Franken-vats or derived from cloned animals or plants or spiked with statin drugs or any other pharmaceutical. I hope that we all can work toward such a tomorrow and that we can leave the comedies and fright-fests to the movie makers, not on our plates.

Setting the Record Straight About Dietary Supplements

By James J. Gormley

Pick up any newspaper, snap on the radio, glance at the TV --- and you’re sure to be hit by the latest “news” about dietary supplements: how they don’t work, how they’re all tainted with contaminants and laced with pharmaceuticals; and how their manufacturers are out to get us!

The truth, however, is far more reassuring than the headlines make out. Go ahead, Google “dietary supplements” with the name of any of the big networks or newspapers, anything from ABC News to the Chicago Sun-Times or CNN, you name it.

I did: and in top search listings for seven of the country’s leading newspapers and five of its major networks, nearly 70% of the coverage is skeptical and cautionary about dietary supplements.

In fact, if we were to believe mainstream media, not since 1866, in Liberty, Missouri, when the James-Younger Gang’s Wild West rampage of robberies and mayhem began, did we see such a lawless frontier as we supposedly have today in the dietary supplement marketplace.

We know, though, that the Wild West ended in 1890 and that over-the-counter drugs (not supplements) are actually the successors of the Traveling Medicine Show patent medicine tradition.

Real Dangers, Supplements Benefits Overlooked
In fact, our self-appointed guardians of public health (whether wielding Senatorial powers or using a journalist’s pen) almost always forget to discuss those tablets and capsules that are profoundly dangerous and largely toxic: prescription drugs. Each year, prescription drugs injure approximately 2.2 million and kill at least 100,000 Americans.

With about 33,000 dietary supplements on the U.S. market, it’s no surprise that with today’s nutritionally bankrupt diet there were 192 million Americans using supplements, a number that is expected to keep growing.

According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), “These products are intended to be used as supplements to, not substitutes for, a well-balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle.” In addition to wanting to provide a basic nutritional “insurance policy” offered by a multivitamin, people take nutritional supplements for a variety of health-promoting reasons.

In a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners and commissioned by the Natural Products Association, seven out of 10 Americans take supplements because they make them feel better.

So, if supplements are so popular, and good for us, why, we ask, are they getting such a bum rap? Good question.

Feeding the undeservedly bad reputation is a confluence of several factors, including: historically poor government enforcement against a small number of fringe operators; general misunderstanding of how well-regulated the dietary supplement industry actually is; and media feeding frenzies related to high-profile cases that have little, or nothing, to do with the dietary supplement industry, aside from actually showing the regulations effectively working.

Facing Facts
Whenever I hear the term, I invariably think of Warner Oland, in those 1930s-era Charlie Chan movies saying, “You must face facts.”

Sometimes I wish we could bring Oland back (minus the political incorrectness) so Chan could face the bad guys — or in this case the purveyors of untruth — with all of the bald-faced facts that our panel touched on.

But that can’t happen, so it’s up to all of us to be myth-busters on a daily, or weekly or monthly basis — so that one day our guardians of public health will have no choice but to acknowledge what we already know: the power and promise of safe dietary supplements that are produced by a responsible, well-regulated dietary supplement industry: in other words, the facts.

It’s time that conventional researchers begin to design studies that build on vitamin research of the last 50 years rather than attempt to poke holes in what we already all know: vitamins promote health, reduce disease and help people live longer … and better.

Germ Hysteria

By James J. Gormley

If you ever were in a hospital awaiting surgery, have you had a nurse or doctor shake your hand while wearing rubber gloves?

I have. It’s one of the least comforting, while most impersonal and sterile, human exchanges that I have experienced.

Are germs today that much more rampant than when I worked on medical-surgical units in a New York City hospital between 1984 and 1988? In those days, latex gloves were only routinely worn when unconscious, geriatric or injured patients were being changed and when actual medical or surgical procedures were being performed.

America’s obsession with germs has certainly grown since then, however, as we have seen with how popular culture has been gripped by microbial madness.

In 1995, two major killer germ movies were released, Twelve Monkeys (a sci-fi thriller in which 99 percent of the Earth’s population has been wiped out by an unknown and deadly virus) and Outbreak, a modern-day fright flick about the Ebola virus.

Following the anthrax scare and the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001, at least two books came out the next year capitalizing on our fears: Killer Germs: Microbial Disease that Threaten Humanity and Secret Agent: The Menace of Emerging Infections.

If you add these dark visions to the real rise of antibiotic-resistant bugs, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, surely there are reasons for concern: real and imagined.

Now while I would not want to dispute the critical importance of the development of the Germ Theory of Disease that was discovered and developed by such scientists as Semmelweiss, Pasteur, Lister and Koch, I am greatly concerned that modern society has apparently transformed our view of germs—those we have always lived with and newer varieties to which we have inadvertently given rise—into an “us vs. them” paradigm, a War on Germs version of the War on Terror (not to even mention those cases in which these wars overlap).

With today’s ubiquitous latex gloves and viral spread of potent hand sanitizers, our evolutionary relationship with germs has been, it seems, left behind … or sanitized away. So has common sense, apparently, along with it the simple virtue of the type of vigorous hand-washing (with good old soap and water) that was always encouraged by our parents and grandparents.

Mark Morford once wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that our nation’s desire to create a sterile world is fraught with larger health and social risks.

He quoted Slate’s Kent Sepkowitz as arguing that, “far from not cleaning, cooking and irradiating our food well enough and far from not ensuring we have the correct FDA precautions, we as an over-pampered culture are probably not getting enough nasty buggy, immune-system-boosting microbes in our diet, in our meats, in our mouths.”

Morford spoke of the true dangers behind an “alarmist, germophobic mindset that insists on sanitized, overcooked ultra-safe bleached-out everything then grows and mutates and extends well beyond the toilet and the kitchen and the backyard and the human gut, straight into human experience as a whole, resulting in one horribly bland, edge-free, prefab life.”

He has a point.

Perhaps a better approach would be to seek germ balance, or bacterial balance, acknowledging that all of life operates with, and within, a series of processes that are constantly in flux — whether we are talking about probiotics and pathogenic bacteria, proper immune response and excessive immune response (which we call allergy, asthma, etc.) or good germs on our skin and the germs that we would much prefer be transient visitors.

What is clear is that almost every global effort to sanitize ourselves and our world has created real and potential health consequences: whether antibiotic resistance and probiotics’ destruction through over-prescription of antibiotics, unwanted byproducts through food irradiation or toxins through the breakdown of certain hand-sanitizer ingredients.

As an arguably enlightened society, we have a unique opportunity to offer solutions which are informed by a more balanced view of health and ecological (including microbial) balance and not feed into the various hysterias that currently plague us.

Medical futility .... or failure to hope?

By James J. Gormley

Some years ago there developed a movement of people who wanted to convince society that doctors could decide whether to withhold, or withdraw, treatment for very sick, or "terminal," patients, "even over the objections of a competent patient."

The movement peaked in 1995 when 134 articles on the topic were published. Between June 1st 2006 and June 1st 2007, there were 75.

In 1992, in an article in the journal, Healthcare Ethics, the authors argued that "complete respect for patients' autonomy reduces the physician from a moral agent to an extension' of the patient's wishes."

God forbid!

Physicians are not moral agents. They are support staff in the job called "health." Mentally competent patients, and their immediate families, are the "moral agents. "

What bothers me is the presumption that care should be rationed for those of us who are the sickest, and moreso, that there's an outrageous assumption that because toxic drugs and invasive surgery (heroic measures) aren't working, then that means that "medicine" can do nothing else for this person.

Clearly, so-called "alternative" healing systems, such as Ayurvedic, Tibetan and Traditional Chinese Medicines, have been providing hope to people for over 4,500 years.

It would seem that mainstream medicine, then, is the "alternative," or new kid on the block. Since "medicine" encompasses so many valid healing systems, we cannot say that medicine has failed.

What has failed is hope. What has failed are the drugs and surgery. What has failed is our capacity to imagine. To imagine a totally different approach.

To imagine vibrant health. To pray. To go outside the bounds of an illness care system that has admitted defeat: medical futility.

An author on the topic wrote, "Talking to patients and their families should remain the focus of our efforts."

How true that is.

Ribbonless Presents, Unwrapped Gifts

By James J. Gormley

Now that the holidays are over, it’s worth remembering that gifts don’t always come in shiny red paper with bright golden ribbons. One of the first gifts I received from my parents had no holiday packaging at all.

On cold winter nights, when I was two, my father, whom I would call Papa, and later “Pa,” would lie awake on the floor next to my crib to comfort me when I would awaken with a bad dream. That’s what a father is; that’s who my father is.

I remember so many special times with my father and mother from my childhood. Me inside the shopping cart Pa pushed up the hill to the A and P. My father telling me the stories about how he and his father, the Old Man, would drive the horse-and-carriage along the Boston Post Road, in Mamaroneck, N.Y., before there were cars. Pa gently singing “All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men” to me as a bedtime lullaby. Playing catch at Bowne Park in Flushing, N.Y., where I grew up. Walking Rexie, my dog, along the tracks of the Long Island Railroad.

My father and mother gave me so many things, ribbon-less presents that I can never reciprocate. Priceless gifts of love, time, caring, wisdom and so much more. I hope Pa knows and Ma knew how special they have always been to me, even if I haven’t always shown it.

Now that the holiday season is over, remember that exchanging presents isn’t the only way to show appreciation to the people who have made a difference in your life. Your gifts to them don’t have to be fancy or trendy or expensive or wrapped in shiny red paper with bright golden ribbons.

Offer them your gratitude to honor, in a small way, all of the many unwrapped gifts they have given you.

New Year, New You!

By James J. Gormley

New Year’s means change. It also means tradition, or that which doesn’t change.


Guy Lombardo

When I was little, the night of December 31st was not New Year’s Eve until I sat down with my parents to watch Guy Lombardo and His Montreal Canadians. It wasn’t New Year’s until my grandmother reminded me to put a shiny quarter out on the windowsill so that the new year would be prosperous, or until the ball dropped in Times Square.

There was no “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve,” and definitely no televised California New Year’s with fake snow and people jumping up and down for the cameras, screaming at 9:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

New Year’s Eve was not always celebrated with drunken revelry and blasts from toy horns, however. In ancient times, and even in some mainstream religions today, the New Year is a time for reflection on the past and hope for the future.

New Year’s, today, can be a curious mixture of the old and the new, the completed and the yet to be. As we usher in this new year, let’s not feel like powerless beings swept along by the unrelenting forces of time.

Let’s embrace the New Year and its challenges. Whatever changes we are faced with, we can be the rulers over our lives. We can transform tragedy into positive energy. We can go forward, then, with a new perspective or a new appreciation for life, itself, and all that which makes it worth living.

Each of us has within ourselves the capacity for change, the capacity for (and right to) happiness and the power to take charge of our lives.

Let’s tap into these energies now, as we enter this new year.

‘Supplements Are Safe, Healthful and Well-Regulated’!

By James J. Gormley

On March 25th, 1999, I was part of a live television debate on FOX-TV’s “Good Day New York” with a drug industry attorney on the topic: “Are dietary supplements regulated?”(1)

Needless to say, with all of the facts showing how well regulated dietary supplements were then, winning the debate was not a difficult accomplishment; I even had the host, Jim Ryan, on the side of supplement consumers about midway through the segment.

In fact, the regulations and laws governing nutritional supplements in 2011 are even more stringent than they were in 1999, when I did that show.

According to attorney Peter Barton Hutt, the “bedrock food safety requirement that has been the foundation of the American food supply since 1906 — the prohibition of poisonous or deleterious substances in food—applies equally to dietary supplements and conventional food” (2).

Supplements: A Super-Regulated Category
Today, dietary supplements have the following requirements and controls over them:

• Pre-market notification to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—not required for drugs or medical devices.
• Labeling.
• Mandatory adverse event (side effect or reaction) reporting to the FDA (not required for foods).
• FDA Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs).
• Facility registration (for the FDA).
• Advertising (by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission).

In fact, broadly speaking, the laws governing supplements under the umbrella of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD and C) are: the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 (NLEA); the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA); the Bioterrorism Act of 2002; the Food Allergen Labeling an Consumer Protection Act of 2004; the Dietary Supplement and Non-Prescription Drug Consumer Protection Act of 2006 (AER Law); and Federal GMPs.

Regarding dietary supplements, the FDA has significant powers, including (but not limited to) the authority to:

• Stop a company from selling any dietary supplement that is unsanitary or unsafe.
• Stop the sale of any dietary supplement that makes false or non-substantiated claims on its labeling.
• Stop the sale of any nutritional supplement that poses “a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury.”
• Block a new dietary ingredient (NDI) from being marketed if the agency does not receive enough safety information in advance.

Likewise, the FTC has a great deal of surveillance and enforcement powers that it uses for dietary supplements, including the ability to: challenge and stop advertising that is not sufficiently substantiated; negotiate a consent order for a company to change or fix its promotional, marketing or advertising practices; and to seek substantial civil penalties for violations of trade regulation rules or violations of cease and desist orders. 

So Why Do We Keep Hearing About Supplements Being Unregulated?
Part of the problem is the media.
As I noted way back in 1999 (1), despite powerful and authoritative research underpinning many of the most popular supplements today, the mainstream media appear to be on a planet where this research is unavailable or incomprehensible.

The FDA itself has also been stoking the misinformation fires about the supplement regulations that it is mandated to implement and enforce. As I noted in July 2009, “The FDA should cooperate with the responsible core of the natural products industry rather than criticizing the very laws that the American people saw fit to pass and which the FDA is sworn to uphold and enforce” (3).

Dietary supplements have “always been regulated as a category of food in this country, and DSHEA did not change that,” according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) (4).

“Dietary supplements are not regulated as drugs because they are not drugs,” added Jeffrey Blumberg, PhD, FACN, director of the Antioxidants Research Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, at Tufts University (3).

According to Hutt, it is “apparent that FDA has adequate statutory authority to assure the safety of both dietary ingredients and conventional food ingredients” (2).

In fact, Hutt adds that the “safety provisions under the FD and C Act applicable to dietary supplements would appear to be stronger than those applicable to conventional food.”

‘Supplements Are Safe, Healthful and Well-Regulated’ may not be a very “sexy” story title as they go, but it is one that really should be front-page news.

Gormley Take-Away: Given all of the recent drug recalls and food contamination outbreaks, I would be much more concerned about the safety of pharmaceuticals and conventional foods than about dietary supplements if I were the average consumer advocate, legislator or reporter. Looking at the powerful safety record of dietary supplements, now officially demonstrated via the AER Law, I would consider beating a different drum than the one associated with unwarranted and uninformed attacks on supplements.

REFERENCES
1. Gormley J. Mass media is unregulated [Editor’s Desk]. Better Nutrition. August 1999.
2. Hutt PB. FDA Statutory Authority to Regulate The Safety of Dietary Supplements [White Paper]. Covington and Burling, June 6, 2003.
3. Gormley J. Making the ‘cut’: What the latest recall tells us … and doesn’t. The Gormley Files. July 21, 2009.
4. Council for Responsible Nutrition. Dietary supplements: Safe, beneficial and regulated. Revised December 2009. Accessible at: http://www.crnusa.org/CRNRegQandA.html

Which is the real bioterrorism?

By James J. Gormley

Recently, I was thinking about the many ways in which nature's balance and our bodies are thrown off kilter by toxins,allergens and disease.

Many of the imbalances are the result of a complex web of disastrously irrational environmental and industrial policies. In most cases, however, the poisoning of our world is not generally considered wantonly malicious, in the strictest sense of that term.

In general, we try to deal with these assaults on our bodily systems' living order (homeostasis) by attempting to purify the body — by identifying toxins and allergens and reducing our exposure to them, supporting the liver and cleaning up the diet.

However, in a post 9/11 world threatened, or haunted, by the specter of biological and chemical warfare, it was not without a degree of trepidation that I happened upon an old article in the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled "Mass Psychogenic Illness Attributed to Toxic Exposure at a High School."

Although the word "psychogenic" is a tip-off that the authors concluded that people were imagining things, I was very curious as to what went on.

Apparently, in November 1998, a teacher at a high school in Tennessee smelled a gasoline-like odor in her classroom. Then she, and others, began to experience such symptoms as headache, nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness.

The school was evacuated, and 80 students and 19 staff members went to a local emergency room; 38 people were hospitalized overnight. Five days later, after the school had reopened, 71 people went to the emergency room.

Although "extensive investigations" were carried out by several government agencies, the authors said: "We were unable to find a medical or environmental explanation for the reported illnesses," and that the illness — although similar to symptoms reported by victims of "bioterrorism" — "bore the "major features of psychogenic shock."

In other words, although over 170 people went to the hospital over the course of five days, they were all, presumably, suffering from some kind of mass hysteria; they were all just imagining things.

Were the Operation Desert Storm veterans all just imagining things, too?

And what about the biological warfare the United States allegedly conducted in Korea in 1952 and 1953, which was said to include plague and anthrax bacilii. Was our entire biological warfare effort just something we imagined, as well?

I wish it were.

Whenever there is something that doesn't offer up immediate scientific validation in neon lights, then, clearly, mainstream medicine's easiest solution is to dismiss it as a figment of an overactive imagination or "mass hysteria."

I truly would like to believe that people in McMinnville, Tennessee, just freaked out for 5 days. I'd also like to believe that a whole host of serious autoimmune disorders, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, are all just products of "psychogenic shock."

But, unfortunately, they're not. And the sooner mainstream medicine, and, our "guardians of public health," come to terms with the fact that our inability to immediately put a "pre-printed label" on a given symptom picture is not, in any way, a determination that a patient is imagining things, the sooner mainstream medicine will come closer to where holistic medicine has always been.

Until then, we have to ask ourselves: where is the real bioterrorism?

Is it a missile carrying plague, or is it when medicine sabotages health, and truth, in a quest for easy answers?

Good Intentions Do Not A Good Bill Make; President Obama Must Veto This Bill

By James J. Gormley

President Obama is waiting to hear from you, your neighbors, your brothers, your sisters, your parents — and all of America — as to whether to sign the "food safety bill" into law.

If you agree with all of the problems we have identified with this bill — or even with most of them — I ask you to please go to the White House comment page and ask the President to veto this bill.

It’s not that the bill is meant to disrupt the American Way of Life or forever change the fabric of our great nation. It is not badly intentioned. It even has some decent provisions in it. On top of that, dietary supplements were ostensibly excluded, as were farms and small food-service operations.

The problem is not what was intended, or what FDA Commissioner Hamburg believes is in this bill. The problem is that the bill’s advocates and many of its supporters were all sold a bill of goods.

The fact is that FSMA will do very little to improve food safety; and, in truth, by obscuring the real core of our nation’s food safety problems with layer upon layer of HACCP requirements, and food allergenicity protections and food safety recordkeeping plans — and all of the $1.4 billion worth of stuff (red tape and feel good busywork) in this bill — this bill would actually make things worse.

Why? Because while Dr. Hamburg and the bill’s cheerleaders are busy shaking hands, and slapping each other on the back as to what an amazing bill this is (which it is not), the disgusting factory farms and filthy slaughterhouses in this country — which are the real problems with our food supply, let’s face it — will not be made any less filthy by this $1.4 billion boondoggle.

What are the remaining problems with this bill that make it un-signable?

If the FDA (Secretary of the HHS) has a “reasonable belief” or feels there is a “reasonable probability” that a food is unsafe, records inspections must be carried out and foods can be quarantined. The FDA has a long and sordid history of abusing this power by making assumptions that hurt food producers, and ultimately consumers.

The FDA already believes (without a shred of evidence) that raw milk and raw milk cheeses are unsafe — wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity for the FDA to close down a cottage industry towards which it has always held such animus?

Now while it is potentially good that the bill includes a proviso (in Section 113) calling for dietary supplement products (that’s why I said ostensibly excludes, above) that may contain (or may be) anabolic steroids to be referred to the DEA, the problem is that that it is way too vague: "may contain" is not definitive enough by a long stretch, which opens the doors for the FDA to believe that many supplements “may contain” anabolic steroids, and hurt legitimate manufacturers in the process.

Section 423 offers manufactuers an opportunity to voluntarily take a product off the market and recall it if the FDA feels that there is a “reasonable probability” that an article of food is misbranded. Well, here we go again; the FDA has time and again greatly overarched in its authority in these areas, often calling products “misbranded” for the smallest mistake in a nutrition facts or product label.

Section 404 insists that nothing in the bill shall in any way be inconsistent with the World Trade Organization or any other international treaty or agreement to which the U.S. is a party! Okay, again, can anyone explain why (I ask why) domestic, sovereign, internal U.S. laws and regulations need to be consistent with international treaties and agreements (such as Codex)?

Section 420 calls for limited distribution of the guidance documents that food producers would need in order to comply with this law in the interests of “national security.” This says that although food facilties will be required to comply with this new law, if the U.S. government does not feel like releasing instructions and guidance on how to properly comply with the requirements, it does not have to, if blanketed under the usual sacred cow of “national security.” Outrageous!

FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg MD truly believes that the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is the greatest thing ever. Sadly, it is not worthy of the President’s signature and was railroaded through Congress under suspended rules and other legislative sleight of hand.

I ask you to tell President Obama to please veto this bill; we will work together on coming up with an alternative bill in 2011 that will be signature-worthy.

Escape from the Emergency Room

By James J. Gormley

I realized one day that I had a medical "situation," a male concern I had wondered about for a couple of months, yet had dealt with via the time-honored male tradition of "avoidance"-- if I pretend everything's okay, the problem will go away -- not exactly the best approach.

Scared about cancer, I sat down with my wife. We resolved to speak with a physician friend the next day, which I did. I was told: "Get thee to an emergency room," in no uncertain terms.

Wracked with fear, I stepped into an emergency room in the Bronx, where I live, and I was shocked. Before me were hundreds of people waiting to be called -- victims of a world without a family doctor, statistics at the periphery of an HMO universe.

There was no hope in this room. Only desperation. Only sickness. Only pain. The room was dark and filthy, the staff looked shell-shocked, and the triage "window" was a l-inch-thick bulletproof barrier.

My heart sank. I felt a ball of worry in the pit of my stomach. I telephoned my car-service friend, Marvin, and asked him to pick me up and drive me to a hospital in Manhattan, one regarded as one of the finest medical institutions in the world.

When the cab drove in along the graceful, flower-lined driveway, I thought that I was pulling up to a Hamptons dinner party, not to a place of X-rays and blood. There were only a couple of people waiting in the immaculate, "elegant" waiting room. I thought, "Now I'll be safe. Now I'm in good hands. "

Or not? The triage nurse ignored most of my questions, and I wound up in a room within the bowels of the E.R. Freezing in a hospital gown, I was examined by a surgeon who was compassionate yet overworked. He informed me that I would need ultrasound testing, and that a urologist would have to see me.

After he left, a nurse ordered me to vacate the room, since they needed it for an "eye injury." I painfully climbed down (without a step-stool) and found myself, ignominiously, having to climb up onto a stretcher in the hallway.

About 2 hours went by before transporters came to bring me to ultrasound. When I was brought back to the E.R., I was deposited in a wheelchair and forgotten.

When my meal arrived (for which I had to practically beg), the urologist intern showed up: 7 hours after I arrived, 4 hours after the ultrasound. He was very vague, and just didn't seem to care. He promised to give me the names of three urological surgeons, and sent me back to the nurse's station, where I waited another hour for my discharge instructions, which I could barely read.

When asked by one of the night-shift nurses, "Who was your nurse?," I told her that I had no idea -- that no one (except for the surgeon) had bothered to give me a name, or ask me if I was okay, or if I needed a sip of water ... anything at all.

When I sit back, and try to process what this experience taught me, I'm left with this thought: It represents the very worst and the very best of what's horribly wrong and allegedly right about mainstream medicine today. It's high-tech but "low-heart," the apex of empirical skill yet the nadir of compassionate medicine.

In 1975, Ashley Montagu said, "One goes through [...] medical school and one's internship learning little, or nothing, about goodness, but a good deal about success."

Pity that goodness needs to be taught, and sad that this is a definition of success.

Is it any wonder that holistic medicine holds the key?

Do You Know Any April Fish?

By James J. Gormley

Pope Gregory XIII

In 16th-century France, the start of the new year was observed on April 1st. It was celebrated like our New Year’s Eve is celebrated today. In 1562, however, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the new year then fell on January 1st.

There were some people, though, who hadn’t heard about the new date for New Year’s, or who didn’t believe it. They continued to celebrate New Year’s Day on April 1st. Other people thought that this was worthy of fun, and so played tricks on those April New Year’s revellers, calling them "April fools." The New Year’s cognoscenti would send their supposedly less-enlightened friends on a "fool’s errand" or would try to make them believe that something false was true.



Gregorian Calendar

In France, today, April 1st is called "Poisson d’Avril," or April Fish. French children try to fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their friends’ backs. When the "young fool" discovers the trick, the mischief maker yells "Poisson d’Avril!"

I often look at those agencies or organizations which will not recognize the power of nutritional healing as April fools. The world has changed, so they should get with the program! In the last century, especially after World War II, science and understanding of nutrition have grown by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, there are still those holdouts — some of whom sit on the Food and Nutrition Board, some of whom serve as public health officials, some of whom direct national heart- and diabetes-focused organizations, and some of whom claim to be science-based but are bought and paid for by big business.

I sometimes wonder what it could conceivably take to convince these holdouts as to the power of nutrition and holistic strategies to improve the health of the world. How many thousands of studies need to be done?

Will there ever be enough data for those whose livelihood, in some cases, seems to be tied to a market that promotes a sterile/unwholesome diet, that promotes the saturation of our earth with toxic pesticides and that prefers synthetic/invasive approaches to "health" over effective self-care options?

While we can’t change these attitudes very easily, we can commit ourselves to be among those who are aware that January 1st is considered New Year’s Day to much of the Western world, in other words — to be among those committed to a way of life that gives more credence to trusting ourselves and proven nutritional/herbal science over those who still buy into what can be called the school of illness care promotion, what is euphemistically termed "healthcare" by some.

Never Stop Dreaming

By James J. Gormley

As I live through the sometimes dark and blustery, often cold and inhospitable, New York days of winter, I feel down sometimes, which is a feeling I know is universal to human experience, although knowing that doesn't make momentary blues easier to bear.

The other night, though, as I stopped at a street corner in the Bronx, where I live, I had a cosmic epiphany, of sorts. Those who know me would be surprised at my sudden adoption of terms that are so often labeled "New Age."

In this magical moment, as the ink black sky was dominated by stellar diadems, as the Little Bear twinkled knowingly in the seemingly close farness of celestial majesty, everything made sense. As I wrote in a poem in the 1970s, called "Weightlessness," it all seemed part of "the Great Cosmic Affair."

Everything fit together. All was right. It felt as if an ultimate, benevolent power was embracing me for an instant that seemed a lifetime, in a forever moment of unimpeachable grandeur.

As the richness of the feeling receded to a warm glow, I slowly made my way back to my house. I began to reflect on the seemingly long-ago bitterly frigid winter days of my youth, when I would sit outside in the backyard of the old house.

I would be in a chair, with a 60x Tasco telescope my portal to the moon, the stars, and to all the infinite beauty that reminds me now why, grounded in earth's soil, we still can't stop dreaming of moonbeams and fairy dust, shiny stars and the wonder of the heavens, a happier life and a better world.

We will lose our footing, from time to time. We may, at times, feel weighed down by gravity, responsibilities and the passage of years. We might even forget to look up, now and again.

But then something will cause us to cast our vision skyward. Some small grace will be bestowed on us, some simple blessing will make itself known. Then we're back in the joy of knowing that hope, like the universe, is endless.

Dreams, like the horizon of space, are boundless. Love, like the capacity to wonder, is as spacious as our hearts allow it to be.

Hope, then, will always flourish as long as we believe in ourselves. As long as we believe in the life-giving power of love. As long as we have faith in out ability to conquer, or transform, any obstacle that's in our path.

Never stop dreaming of moonbeams and fairy dust, shiny stars and the wonder of the heavens, a happier life and a better world.

"Food Safety" Bill In Desperate Need of a Presidential Veto

By James J. Gormley

As you may know, the so-called Food Safety and Modernization Act cleared the U.S. House of representatives by a vote of 215 to 144 less than two days after Senate Republicans gave a surprise “victory” to the legislation’s advocates by allowing legilsators to move the package by questionable, legislative sleight-of-hand, otherwise called unanimous consent.

"This legislation is the product of a flawed process," said Rep. Frank Lucas, the top Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, as reported by FarmPolicy.com. "It gives the Food and Drug Administration lots of additional authorities with no accountability.” (Listen to Congressman Lucas’ comments here.)

Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, the ranking GOP member on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the FDA, told The Washington Post that the number of cases of food-borne illnesses in the country does not justify the $1.4 billion the new law is estimated to cost over the first five years.

"We're going to have to evaluate everything and set priorities at a time of reduced appropriations for all the different discretionary programs," Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) told the Post.

Latham serves on the FDA appropriations subcommittee and, along with Kingston and the panel's two other Republicans, voted against the food safety bill. The food safety legislation "is going to have to compete with everything else," he told the Post.

The Act would cost American taxpayers $825 million in 2011 alone ($1.4 billion over the first five years) and does not even touch the root causes of the U.S.’s food safety problems — such as factory-farming — which were highlighted in both a 2009 campaign by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) and by a letter to 99 U.S. senators by the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF USA).

In fact, the legislation, at it stands now, is saddled with an extreme overreliance on a risk algorithm-based approach to food safety, referred to as Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point (HACCP) and an under-reliance on old-fashioned, on-site physical inspections.

This bill, despite its name and intent, would not make this country's food supply more safe, but less safe.

If this bill were to become law, it would be a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that would make our food safety system much more complex, more focused on hazards analysis than on physical inspections and no less beset by dirty factory farms and filthy slaughterhouses than it was before.

Please ask President Obama to veto this legislation so that consumers — not industry lobbyists and agri-business cronies — can develop a true food safety bill that will improve this country’s food-safety system, not bog it down with paperwork, smoke and mirrors.