The biotech company Future Fields has notified the Canadian authorities of its intention to commercialize EntoEngine, a genetically modified fly. The flies are engineered to produce foreign proteins – in this case, growth factors, which are cell signaling molecules that play important roles in cell proliferation and development, for use in what Future Fields calls “cellular agriculture” – what we call lab-grown or fake meat, GMWatch reported.
Source:GMWatch Report by Claire Robinson; technical advice by Dr Michael Antoniou
The public can comment on the application until 28 January 2023 and we encourage them to do so. In GMWatch’s view, EntoEngine flies poses serious environmental risks in the likely event that they will escape contained conditions.
The details
The company says, “The EntoEngine fly line has been genetically engineered to express a growth factor isolated from cows…. The gene sequence poses no known risks to either humans or animals. Expression of the gene encoding the growth factor is under the control of a gene expression regulator isolated from yeast.”
Future Fields argues that the GM fly is needed to replace the usual way of producing growth factors – in bioreactors. The company confirms what GMWatch has long said – that bioreactor technology is expensive, resource and energy hungry and produces vast quantities of problematic waste. The company concludes, reasonably, that growth factors cannot be produced cost-effectively using bioreactor technology – so they aim to produce them in GM drosophila, or fruit flies.
The company makes grand claims for the fly’s sustainability and environmental friendliness, compared with bioreactor protein production, based on lower input use and less greenhouse emissions. Drosophila, Future Fields says, “do not have these large operation costs and require only modest environmental controls to ensure optimal rearing… Drosophila can feed on organic side streams and byproducts from other processes (i.e. organic waste). In fact, insects are some of the most efficient organisms at converting nutrients into biomass.”
However, the problem with this “solution” is that even with a cheaper source of cell growth factors in the shape of the flies, lab grown meat will still need to be produced in huge bioreactors, with the consequent vast running costs and environmental impacts.
Patent
Future Fields describes the status of the patent on EntoEngine as “pending”. Our patent search on the Espacenet and USPTO databases only found one patent on a GM insect with Future Fields as an applicant. The patent, titled “Method for producing recombinant proteins in insects”, describes the general concept patent but lacks the experimental data to prove that the system actually works. It’s unclear whether other patents exist, but the details of this patent illustrate the types of process that would be used for EntoEngine protein production.
The patent focuses on heat stress (taking the temperature up to 35-40 degrees C) as the trigger that will activate expression of the transgenes in the flies to produce the desired growth factors.
The expression of the transgenes encoding for the desired protein (in this case, mammalian cell growth factors) is under the control of a “gene expression regulator” derived from yeast. So these flies would appear to contain two foreign transgenes: One encoding the desired protein to be expressed and isolated from the flies; and the other encoding the yeast gene expression regulator.
In all likelihood, the yeast-derived gene expression regulator is a member of the heat shock factor family of proteins. The function of these proteins is elevated upon heat stress and their role is to increase expression of genes that will help the organism protect itself from external stresses (e.g. heat, cold, UV light).
Torturing fruit flies
Regarding the heat stress trigger, the patent describes a gruesome and torturous process of gradually getting the flies used to the higher temperature of the heat stressor so that they don’t die from the shock of a sudden rise, by applying the stressor interspersed with “rest” periods.
When the insects have exhausted their ability to produce growth factor, they are killed and “harvested”, in the words of the Future Fields patent, then ground up into a mass, and the desired protein is extracted and purified out. It is unclear how well the purification process will work and GMWatch warns that native fly proteins could end up contaminating the final product.
Doubtful ethics
The company’s patent and publicity make a big deal out of the supposedly superior ethics of using fruit flies to manufacture growth factors for “cellular agriculture”, as opposed to extracting them from fetal bovine serum (FBS) taken “from fetuses of pregnant cows prior to slaughter”. The patent says that cattle-derived FBS gives rise to “ethical concerns regarding the production of cultured meat products”.
But the point on ethics is disingenuous and contradictory, as Future Fields itself justifies its GM flies approach as replacing growth factors produced in bioreactors and not as replacing FBS, because FBS is not used by the lab grown meat industry.
Along the same lines, Future Fields’ use of language in its patent seems manipulative. While the cattle from which FBS is derived are subject to “slaughter”, the GM fruit flies are merely “harvested”, just like the crop plants that even vegans would be happy to eat.
But anyone concerned with the ethics around animal use in agriculture is unlikely to be impressed by Future Fields’ description of its GM fly as “a standalone biofactory” – the ultimate reduction of a living creature to a machine.
At a time when prominent environmentalists, from Sussex University’s Prof Dave Goulson to TV’s David Attenborough, are trying to persuade the public to give insects the respect they deserve as key regulators of ecosystems, genetically engineering fruit flies and then characterising them as “biofactories” or as non-sentient beings on a par with a wheat or maize crop seems distasteful in the extreme.
By timely coincidence, recently published EU-funded research shows that fruit flies, though “tiny”, are ” amazingly smart”. They are capable of attention, working memory and conscious awareness – abilities we usually only associate with mammals.
Environmental risks
The main risk posed by the GM flies is environmental. Containment facilities for GM animals are notoriously insecure – GM glofish have escaped from tanks and are breeding in the wild in Brazil and a whistleblower report paints a damning picture of lax attitudes and neglect of protocols at AquaBounty’s GM salmon-producing facilities. The risk with GM flies is that they could escape and breed in the environment or cross-breed with natural flies, leading to the escape of growth factor-producing genes into wild populations.
This wouldn’t pose a human health risk, as most of us don’t eat living fruit flies and the proteins in dead flies would quickly degrade. But plenty of animals, including mammals, fish, amphibians, and birds, do eat living flies. Because the growth factors in the GM flies are mammalian, they will to some degree be active in any animal that ingests them. This could cause uncontrolled cell division in the animal consumer – potentially leading to cancer.
In evaluating environmental risk in the case of an escape, much depends on what triggers are used to make the growth factor-producing genes express. The heat stress triggers discussed in the patent are worrying because they are designed to spring into action at 35-40 degrees C – temperatures regularly reached in the climate conditions of many parts of the world. And this raises the question: What happens at 31 or 32 degrees? Nothing, or something? And if something, then what?
Conclusion
Future Fields’ GM fly appears to be an invention of dubious utility that will do little to improve the sustainability of the environmental catastrophe-in-the-making that is lab grown meat. It poses unacceptable environmental risks in the event of an escape and the ethics around the GM fly’s grim life and grimmer death are dubious, to say the least.
Sujon blackcurrant, or any NZ blackcurrant, has been shown in several studies to improve performance and recovery. I have even met Professor Mark Willems from the UK, who did the original research. It may have something to do with how the berry adapts to the berry to high UV in NZ. Here’s a quick summary: https://www.sujon.co.nz/post/which-fruits-are-higher-in-antioxidants
So, I use it daily in my sports drinks when training and in recovery. Everyone will benefit but best when combined as follows:
The Therapeutics Product bill will limit access to supplements, herbs, spices & everyday foods.
What will you do to save your health & that of your children?
What will you do for happiness, wealth & a life well lived?
Without our health, these precious aspects of our lives are either not obtainable or meaningless.
Ardern may be gone, but the Therapeutics Product bill is not. There is a long way to go to reunite New Zealanders but a good place to start is in everyone’s interest – our health.
Vitamin C, aloe vera (even in your garden), cinnamon, fish oil, n-acetyl cysteine, Vitamin B12, magnesium, kawa-kawa, zinc, selenium, astragalus, niacin, calcium, bilberry, Vitamin A, iodine, crampbark, thiamine, iron, lavender, riboflavin, thyme, oats, valerian, chromium, ginger, coenzyme Q10, glutamine, chaste tree, echinacea, pantothenic acid, St John’s wort, slippery elm, tumeric, soy, probioitics, folate, licorice, garlic, flaxeed oil, cocoa, cranberry, pyridoxine, cloves, celery, carnitine, evening primrose oil, Vitamin D, New Zealand green lip mussel, psyllium, Vitamin E, tea, quercetin, rosemary……..
These compounds and many more are now under threat of being restricted to big companies and only available on a doctor’s prescription. The doctor in turn will likely not know anything about the health benefits of quercetin.
Think about how the “no” vote affected access to medicinal CBD. It is now on prescription only and costs around ten times the amount it did before. Do you want to pay ten times the price for Vitamin C or valerian?
And this for supplements that are estimated to be 45 000 times safer than pharmaceuticals and for food that we eat or drink daily.
Dr Guy Hatchard explains in more detail in this post.
What You Can Do
Stand up and speak out!
We did it before and it worked
Talk to everyone and anyone you can
Form a group
Hold a placard
Make a submission – Submissions close on 15th February
Start a petition
Visit your local MP – frequently.
The government needs to know how many people oppose this bill.
Let’s Speak Out Together for Our Health – and Our Lives
NZDSOS is preparing a submission, but it is going to take all of us to let the government and whoever the prime minister is, know that the people of New Zealand oppose this bill and if it is passed it will hurt them in this election year.
While you’re with your MP, why not mention the WHO’s plan to impose health controls on us via the IHR, and that many of us are dying and injured from the jabs, especially the young. They need to know that we know.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has resigned after months of rumours. Ardern, whose popularity has plummeted during the last six months, told us “she had nothing left in the tank”.
The backstory to this resignation is a tale of woe. Ardern said she wants to be remembered as someone who tried to be kind. The subtext is: the country is in an unprecedented mess but don’t blame me.
Last year school attendance was reported as running at just 67% on any given day. Machete wielding teenagers are ram raiding liquor outlets, vape shops, dairies, and jewelry stores daily in a frenzied crime wave. The health system is overwhelmed. Ardern’s government promised to build 100,000 new homes over three years. It has delivered just 1500 to date.
Our tourist, farming, and hospitality industries have not recovered from lockdowns and border closures. It now takes weeks to get a visa to visit New Zealand (it used to take two days) and the government says it only wants rich people to come. No wonder, we are all poor now.
Ardern famously insisted on universal Covid vaccination mandates. There is a suspicion that our 90% vaccination rate has left everyone in a lethargic fog. Excess all cause deaths are still running 15% above the long term trends, and it is not Covid.
History will judge Ardern harshly, but don’t blame her alone. This was a Parliament who woke up on all sides of the house to the weakness of our constitutional arrangements (there are none worth the name). The Bill of Rights was tossed aside, and no one in Parliament cared.
The leader of the National opposition Chris Luxon famously said pre-pandemic if he was in power, he would withdraw benefits from unvaccinated single mothers. David Seymour, leader of the ACT party wrote on his FB those losing their jobs through vaccine mandates only had themselves to blame. Labour’s coalition partners, the Greens, led by example, encouraging mothers in labour to ride to hospital on a bicycle (yes they did).
Politicians of all parties were afraid to meet protestors and turned the hoses on them rather than listen to their concerns.
Revelations this week (here and here) that Ardern personally overruled her scientific advisors who were expressing doubts about the safety of Covid vaccines for young people and the wisdom of mandates, have circulated very widely and no doubt this has further undermined confidence in the government.
Ardern introduced ‘rule by regulation’. Adopting the enabling model favoured by fascists in the 1930s, her government has empowered authorities to tell us all what to do, when to stay at home, and where not to go. The courts, the Human Rights Commission, and the broadcast regulators have all followed the government line meticulously which has had a devastating effect on business, families, communities, and professions. To cement her policies, Ardern introduced massive government funding of our media and broadcasters—a hallmark of repressive regimes.
Ardern was a protege of Tony Blair and a graduate of the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum young leaders program. Both must shoulder some blame too. What fantasies of global power did they offer to a young person who was given to idealistic dreaming that segued into fanaticism?
Ardern’s government, in an absurd overreach, has also funded a nationwide effort to discredit critics of policy, labelling them terrorists. This has divided a formerly egalitarian society, instituting a snitch culture that encourages us to dob in a neighbour. Government Disinformation Project employees appeared on funded films aired on television to a backdrop of atomic bombs exploding and Nazi stormtroopers marching. Absurdly they labelled knitting, blond hair, braids, vaccine hesitancy, love of natural foods, Yoga, and yes motherhood as signs of terrorism that should be reported to the intelligence services (yes they did, view it here on TVNZ if you can stand watching this nasty piece of propaganda and hate).
Why did Ardern suddenly change overnight in August 2021 from being a kindly figure saying she would never mandate vaccines, to being one of the world’s most draconian proponents? We can only speculate. New Zealand is a member of the five eyes intelligence network. Given the Pentagon’s recently revealed massive involvement in US Covid policy and gain of function research funding, was she fed information that a bioweapon was in play? We will likely never know.
The cynical will say that Ardern left early like Key to avoid the ignominy of U-turns and election defeat. Leaving open the possibility of political rebirth. The New York Times wrote this morning that Ardern, like Helen Clark, is in line for a global role and a bigger platform. We live in dread.
For a couple of weeks now government announcements and advertisements encouraging vaccination and boosters have been conspicuously absent. Has the penny finally dropped? We doubt it. It will take an honest, intelligent politician (are there any left?) to roll back Ardern’s dictatorial powers and kickstart New Zealand. Why would any aspiring newby give up that much power? The prospect will be too intoxicating, but that is what it will take. Someone has to rise above the mire of our current politics and realise that governments should represent the interests of people. Leadership is about fulfilling the aspirations of your followers, not just telling them what to do.
Our final verdict: It is not Ardern, but the whole New Zealand Parliament elected in 2020 that will be judged as the worst in our short history as an independent island nation, formerly famous for championing the underdog and offering opportunity to all. Ardern’s resignation lights a bonfire of the excesses of modern democracy. To find a way ahead, at the very least, the New Zealand Bill of Rights needs to be entrenched beyond the reach of power hungry politicians and compliant courts.
Great excitement for many in NZ, others not so much. For the former group, don’t get too excited. Remember Smiling Assassin Key resigning? He’s now a ‘Sir’. And just this week, in similar vein to that predecessor, there have been disturbing revelations of alleged lies (a serious must read) from our single source of truth.
Could these have hastened her departure? We’ll likely never know for sure.
Those who are aware of the globalists’ strategies will know that timing is everything. Their global leaders are greatly rewarded for the paths of destruction they create whilst in office. Remember Sir Roger Douglas? Wrecked NZ on claims of improving the economy, now nicely and comfortably retired in the sunny north. (Meanwhile the rich got richer and the poor are even poorer). Ms Clarke, who let the GE corn crops into ‘clean green’ EnZed, beavering away on global governance at the UN. These young global leaders, servants of Klaus & Co, are suitably stepped aside at the right time (that being when too many of the public are waking up and/or they are widely hated), and either way, they know they will be well looked after.
It’s fairly likely Jacinda will in due course become a Dame and like others before her, will be well rewarded for her more recent years of discomfort at the hands of an awakening public. A nice well paid job in realms offshore until the public’s pain has worn off and the wounds are less raw. By then the newly installed leader (be it a Nat or a Labourite, same bird, different wings) will be well along the way in the next phase of installing the (not) great reset.
It’s a globalist script people, we have the mere illusion of democracy.
Readers that have followed my weekly columns and books will be well aware of how I have combined gardening with health.
I know that naturally grown vegetables and fruit will be very beneficial to your health and well being and when you add all the 114 known minerals to the growing media then the same food plants will be super healthy and taste so good.
The minerals can be obtained from using Wallys Unlocking your soil (minerals from rocks) Wallys Ocean Solids (Minerals from the blue waters of the ocean) and Magic Botanic Liquid (MBL which is minerals from prehistoric times).
The most benefit from your produce is obtained by eating raw or only lightly cooked.
The fast way to obtain maximum goodness is by converting healthy foliage into a drink we call ‘smoothies’
This is achieved with a very high speed blender which smashes the molecules of the plant material used allowing for easy assimilation into your body when you drink the green liquid.
Take the leaves of edible plants such as lettuce, carrot tops, celery, wheat or barley grass, silverbeet etc.
There are also a number of weeds that are edible such as Puha or Rauriki, dandelion and Stinging nettles.
Every plant has some beneficial properties even ones that are not normally eaten.
For instance there are about 3 or 4 different coloured carrots you can grow and each one has their own health benefits.
I always add a banana to my smoothies as it gives a nice palatable flavour.
We know that for thousands of years people in different areas of the planet learnt about plants growing in their area which they could use for their health and medical purposes.
I read one time that there is a plant or plants some where on the planet that will cure any ills of humans; in some cases we just have not found that plant yet or have the knowledge of how to use it.
Much of the pharmaceutical medicines was originally found through the old remedies of various plants people had used for generations.
The original chemists had jars of all sorts of dried plants and minerals which they would use to make up the concoctions that added recovery from sickness.
We hear about Chinese medicines, Indian medicines and even Maori medicines most of which were derived from locally grown plants and herbs.
A problem arises as Big Pharma cannot make money out of natural remedies as they cannot be patient. So if you know your herbs and herbal lore the poor pharmaceutical companies are not able to take your money with their concoctions.
Recently we saw during the holiday break our beloved Govt once again trying to implement a bill to ban the traditional use of herbs and plants for your well being. This is their third attempt at doing so and again removing another of your rights to be able to treat yourself and look after your own heath.
The Therapeutic Products Bill replaces the Medicines Act 1981 and Dietary Supplements Regulations 1985 with a comprehensive regulatory regime that is (said to be) fit for the future.
Labour having failed twice in the past to pass legislation because of public outcry are using a different tact to make it happen..’The Bill establishes a new regulator within Manat Hauora – Ministry of Health, headed by an independent statutory officer,
with a wider remit than the medicines regulator Medsafe.’
This person can deem any plant, herb, fruit and vegetable as beneficial to your health and thus ban the use of it, the growing of it and the import of it.
The only benefit of this has to be for the pharmaceutical companies and removes our freedom of choice to take what is traditionally safe natural remedies to what are often not safe pharmaceutical medicines.
In 2017 Labour opted for a prohibited list of 300 common herbal ingredients.
More well know on these included Aloe Vera, Comfrey, Belladonna, Hibiscus, Jasmine, Snowdrop, Juniper, Mustard, Worm wood, Cinnamon, Almond, Grapeseed, Ipomoea, Neem, Eggplant, senna and Valerian.
Many of these plants, herbs and spices like Cinnamon, Mustard are currently sold in shops. So how on earth did they get onto a prohibited list?
The answer lies in attempts to gain control of our food supply.
Natural products that are beneficial to health cannot be patented, but synthetic copies can be.
To make this work, the products that grow in gardens need to be banned.
Already I see Senna which is a natural aid for constipation is not easily obtainable in NZ.
Labour and the Ministry of Health did not make this list up, the list was supplied by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) of which Medsafe is a member.
ICMRA is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry whose interests they serve.
If we wish to be able to continue to freely chose herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up.
Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use.
Many of us do not realise what uses there are for many plants we grow in our gardens and while researching for this article I discovered https://medicinalseedkit.com/kit/
Have a look, I was amazed the wealth of information that is there.
For instance Chicory : This is the wild plant that Native Americans used to look for more than any other.
They’d harvest and use chicory to make a natural painkilling extract for a wide range of physical discomforts, especially stiff and achy joints. And so can you!
The root is rich in chicoric acid (CA), a plant compound with potent anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties but no risk of addiction.
If our pharmacies ever run dry, having even a small patch of chicory growing in your own backyard will provide relief. There are many more such as:
Chamomile – The Natural Antibiotic
Evening Primrose – A Natural Remedy for Skin and Nerves
California Poppy – Better Than Sleeping Pills
Feverfew– Nature’s Aspirin for Fevers and Migraines
Knowledge is power over your destiny and well being and it should never be taken away from you by Government regulations not in our interest.
I have on both counts and if you would like a copy of the email I sent to most of the Labour MP’s just ask and I will send you the copy.
You can alter it to suit and use it in your words to the MP’s.
If enough people complain then you maybe we will be still able to still grow your lemon tree (good for colds).
No more broccoli (Some kids will be happy) as it is a great source of antioxidants and may enhance your health by reducing inflammation, improving blood sugar control, boosting immunity, and promoting heart health.
Why Is Broccoli a Superfood? fiber, vitamin C, vitamin K, iron, and potassium.
The list goes on.
Phone 0800 466464 Garden Pages and News at www.gardenews.co.nz Shar Pei pages at www.sharpei.co.nz Mail Order products at www.0800466464.co.nz New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Part II of the Act covers a broad range of Civil and Political Rights. As part of the right to life and the security of the person, the Act guarantees everyone:
1The right not to be deprived of life except in accordance with fundamental justice (Section 8)
2The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading, or disproportionately severe treatment or punishment (Section 9)
3The right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without consent (Section 10)
4The right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment (Section 11)
Furthermore, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees everyone: Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion. This includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO ADOPT AND HOLD OPINIONS WITHOUT INTERFERENCE (Section 1)
Note: Grow your own! ‘They’ won’t be eating GM food, bugs and so on. The fake food is just for you. Note also, Bill is planning on other additions to your food supply. EWR
If “you are what you eat,” as the old adage has it, then what does that make us?
As consumers of heavily processed, chemically treated, GMO-infested gunk, we in the modern, developed world have “solved” the problem of hunger that plagued our forebears since time immemorial by handing our food sovereignty over to a handful of corporate conglomerates. The result of this handover has been the creation of a factory farming system in which genetically engineered crops are doused in glyphosate and livestock are herded into tiny pens where they live their entire lives in fetid squalor, pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones until they are slaughtered and shipped off to the supermarkets and fast food chains.
There have been any number of documentaries and exposés produced in recent decades detailing the dangers of this industrial farming system that we find ourselves beholden to, any number of activists ringing the alarm about these problems, any number of campaigns and marches organized to raise awareness about these issues. Yet still, nation after nation gets fatter and sicker as traditional diets based on fresh produce sourced from local farmers are displaced by the fast food pink slime sourced from the industrial farms of the Big Food oligopoly.
But as bad as things may be, they’re about to get even worse. As crisis after crisis disrupts the food supply, the “solution” to these problems has already been prepared. New technologies are coming online that threaten to upend our understanding of food altogether. Technologies that could, ultimately, begin altering the human species itself.
Re-posting this from 2019 … shared a good six months before that planned event. Dean’s website is no longer up. I believe it got taken down. Note he has written several excellent books, worth acquiring…finally an excerpt from the article that’s very relevant at the moment… NZ is part of Five Eyes:
“SERCO’s specialty is in handling sensitive cyber-data, including criminal records, driver’s license records, vaccination records, DNA databases, and military records and communications. This puts them in a position to completely control the Five Eyes governments and their citizens”...EWR
Thanks to Dean Henderson at hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com for this brilliant article. Important information & truly intriguing but maybe not surprising knowing the grip all of these giant corporations now have on the planet. Pertinent right now as world events unfold & escalate, with the suppression of information & censorship of the net ramping up. The modern day replication of what was formerly book burning.
Two snippets from the article:
“SERCO, a powerful British company close to Lockheed Martin, GE and BAE. The first and last are the two biggest defense contractors in the world. All four are part of Crown Agents USA Inc. The golden share in SERCO is controlled through British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) by Queen Elizabeth II.
During the 1990’s SERCO took its “services” international, focusing on the Five Eyes Alliance countries of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US. The middle three countries are part of…
December, January, February are the best months for planting vegetables and flowers for winter food and colour.
The reason is you need to catch the longer day light hours to obtain reasonable growth.
The day light hours are progressively diminishing but during these months there is ample time to get plants to a mature state before winter sets in.
Once it chills down vegetables which are mature or near mature, will hold nicely in the garden for you to harvest as you require.
There is a problem from my experience is that seedling nurseries don’t produce winter type vegetable plants and flowers until we are just about into winter. By then by then you have lost the growth of the longer day light hours.
Chances are that they will sit and sulk during winter then bolt in the spring to flower.
Many gardeners prefer to buy seedling in punnets or cell packs to plant which is very expensive even if you are getting a head start in comparison to growing from seed.
That is only an advantage at the start as seed sown vegetables, sown at the same time as transplanted seedlings from seedling packs, will out grow the transplants and give you a superior plant.
The key is not to sow seeds in containers to transplant but to direct sow where they are going to grow and mature.
Nature is by far the best plant grower from seed that I know of; just look at the crops of weeds that Nature has germinated in your gardens.
I am going to show you now the very best way to direct sow and grow seed in open ground or in raised gardens.
Select a sunny area of either of the above and remove all weeds that are currently growing there.
Rake the soil over to obtain a nice level area of friable soil.
Over this you sprinkle blood & bone, sheep manure pellets and Ocean Solids.
Alternative or as well as you can use any animal manures you have available.
Lightly rake the above to mix with soil or growing medium.
Then place about 4 layers of newspaper or one layer of thin cardboard to suppress any weed seeds that are likely to germinate. Wet down the paper or cardboard.
Next spread a layer of good purchased compost and I recommend Daltons Compost as its not just a bag of rubbishy bark with some lime and fertiliser thrown in.
(Some contains green waste that has herbicides in it as well which is no great help in establishing your plants.)
You are now ready to sow seeds of crops suitable for this time of year sowing
You need to do a bit of research on the Internet for mail order seeds from Egmont Seeds or Kings Seeds
Look at all the types available in say cabbages to see which ones are for winter growing/harvesting.
Buy the ones that suit you and the season best.
Open pollinate seeds are preferred ones to buy and g row as they will mature at different times rather than all at once. You can also note the recommended plant spacing distances on the ones you are buying.
Normally there are a lot of seeds in the packet and you are only going to sow a few of them at one time.
The packets with spare seed in them can be placed in a glass jar with a lid and placed in your fridge to keep well for future plantings.
Say the spacing is 30cm apart then you are going to put 2 seeds 15cm apart on top of your purchased compost and then spray them with Magic Botanic Liquid (MBL) before lightly covering them with the compost.
Leave for a day and then lightly water the area. Repeat lightly watering each day or if drying out quickly twice a day.
After a few days or a week or more you should have a strike with lots of the sown seeds sprouting.
Allow them to grow about 5 cm tall and spray them weekly with MBL.
Once they are at about 5 to 8cm tall you are going to cull out the crop.
Where two seeds have both germinated together select the stronger looking one and with a pair of scissors cut the weaker one off at ground level.
Allow all the other seedlings to grow and water to keep soil moist. As we are at say 15cm apart and not the preferred 30 cm we wait till the foliage of all are starting to touch each other
then we harvest the young plants to leave growing plants 30 cm apart (or what ever is the ideal spacing according to the seed packet info.)
The harvested young plants can be eaten/cooked in any suitable way.
If you have ample room and you want to plant for succession then repeat sowing as above in a months time and even a late sowing a month later in March.
That is it till the spring.
I can foresee that purchased vegetables are going to become very expensive over the next year or more for several reasons.
Imported chemical fertilisers that the commercial growers use are in short supply and much dearer than they used to be.
There are already and will be more crop failures from flooding or droughts and growth is slower because of the lack of direct sunlight from overcast and cloudy days.
If you have heard about the proposed ‘Dimming of the Planet’ to offset global warming by creating hazy skies and then if you are aware it; this has nothing to do with global warming but everything to do with slowing food crops growth so you have to eat Bill Gates Lab grown food or starve.
There is a lot of truth in the saying ‘Control the food and money and you control the people’.
I learnt of a recent problem in the Philippines were a kilo of onions is now the equivalent price of $20 NZD. Reason I believe is the flooding in northern parts of Philippines where the weather is a bit more like ours and a lot of food crops are grown there.
One Filipino friend going back for a holiday said she is not taking chocolates as normal but a suitcase of onions.
Taking about Philippines and their food stuffs we have a Philippine/Asian food distribution centre here in Marton which you can order non frozen food stuffs on line and have them sent to your home with your gardening requirements.
You are likely to be surprised at how better value many items are compared to Supermarket brands of similar products. Spaghetti sauces for instance are very popular with Europeans and about half the price of NZ brands.
Also save money in your gardens by seed sowing vegetables as I have described above.
Those people that took my advice in earlier articles about having a few chickens on their property will now be enjoying the fresh eggs daily and not paying about $10.00 a dozen at the supermarket.
Its just a sign of things to come I think.
ALSO DONT FORGET OUR CURRENT PROMOTION TILL END OF MONTH..
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Wallys Cat Repellent 200 grams 20% off
All the rest of our products (except bulk ones and Asian food stuff ) 10% off.
Place orders on our mail order web site at www.0800466464.co.nz and place in comments ‘PEST SALE’ so I know to do the discounts when I will phone you.
I will apply discounts and Shipping (if any) before I phone you with the total.
Then we either do Credit/Debit card over phone or I will email you bank transfer details.
If in North Island and order comes to $100 after discounts then free shipping.
In South Island $150.00 after discounts for free shipping.
The total does not include bulk items such as 12kilo BioPhos, 13kg Ocean solids and 10 kg Unlocking soil (Freight is always charged on bulk products)
New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Part II of the Act covers a broad range of Civil and Political Rights. As part of the right to life and the security of the person, the Act guarantees everyone:
1The right not to be deprived of life except in accordance with fundamental justice (Section 8)
2The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading, or disproportionately severe treatment or punishment (Section 9)
3The right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without consent (Section 10)
4The right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment (Section 11)
Furthermore, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees everyone: Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion. This includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO ADOPT AND HOLD OPINIONS WITHOUT INTERFERENCE (Section 1)
For millions of years, humans and animals have maintained their health by eating the fruits of the earth.
The necessity and benefits of a broad natural diet are evident from Egyptian skeletal remains from 6000 years ago, which suggest scurvy—a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. In 1753 a Scottish surgeon, James Lind demonstrated that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit. The New Zealand government seems intent on changing history.
Just before Christmas, our Government introduced the Therapeutic Products Bill for its first reading. Public consultation is being rushed through the summer holidays here in the southern hemisphere and closes on February 15th. The Bill contains 423 pages of dense provisions with countless cross references. I am not sure whether any MPs actually read it before voting for its acceptance or whether the public could stand to do so. You can view my video summary of its draconian provisions here.
You might be interested in the kind of nation we will end up inhabiting:
Reverse Patenting
If a Natural Health Product is found to benefit a serious illness (such as lemons which benefit scurvy), according to the Bill it should be classed as a medicine. Consequently, according to the letter of the new law, only doctors will be allowed to prescribe lemons. Joking apart, most foods benefit serious illness. You might think there is no need to pass a law classifying them as medicines, but according to the government you would be wrong.
80% of drugs are in fact derived from the properties of plants. For years pharmaceutical companies have been trying to patent medicinal plants and secure a monopoly of their supply and use. But this effort largely failed in the patent courts. The remedy for pharmaceutical companies is contained in the Bill being introduced by our Labour government. If a plant is used to make a medicine or the molecular structure of any of its compounds is mimicked by a medicine, then the use of the actual plant should be restricted.
For this reason, in 2016, a bevy of well-paid Ministry of Health experts (???) produced an idiotic list of common plants that they envisioned should be restricted. Natural products in this list included cinnamon, eggplant, almond, mustard, tea (yes you did read that correctly), coconut, and many many others. The present Bill (the third attempt over the years to get this past Parliament) sets up the same conditions that prompted the 2016 list of restricted plants. A sort of frenzied desire to control the minutia of individual life driven by a mad instinct that the government always knows best.
More than 50% of NZ citizens use natural products, so you might think their availability should not be controlled by the government. Wrong again. The Bill requires the appointment of a regulator who will decide for us what among what we have eaten for millennia can be sold openly and what should be restricted. The idea that one person can decide for all of us what plants that grow in the earth, can be sold, eaten, or used puts New Zealand in a unique class among tin pot kingdoms. We can imagine as we gather around the family breakfast table a swarm of well-paid government experts with pens and questionnaires hovering close by for a final check.
The situation at the border is very similar. If a herb benefits health, it will be a medicine and therefore cannot be imported except with a permit. Border officials will be very busy examining packages and if they find anything healthy, tossing it in the bin. Am I exaggerating? No. Rauwolfia Serpentina is an Indian herb that reduces blood pressure. Studies such this one published in 2015 show it is a safe and effective treatment for high blood pressure, but it is banned here in New Zealand because some hypertension drugs contain synthetic copies of one of the many alkaloids found in the whole plant—reverse patenting at its best.
Why is the Government Intending to Regulate Natural Health Products?
A rational answer to this question is hard to find. A recent EU study found that natural health products are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs. The government, however, apparently believes they are unsafe, but where is the evidence? It doesn’t exist. An imaginary NZ doctor explains to their teenage patient:
“Years ago, before you were born, dearly beloved, a person whose name is lost in the mists of time might have felt a little off colour after taking a vitamin tablet and then recovered quickly. Ever since then, the New Zealand government has quite rightly been very suspicious of vitamins and plants grown in soil. So they are introducing a new and very honest law for us all.” or words to that effect.
There are many continuous traditions of natural approaches to health that have been followed by cultures on every continent for thousands of years and still are. There are more modern ones too that have attracted followers guided by trained practitioners. These include Indian Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Chiropractic, Homeopathy, etc. The idea that a regulator who is unfamiliar with these traditions should control their practice and availability is inherently flawed.
This Bill represents an attempt to impose a modern medical/pharmaceutical straight jacket on the process of medical choice. A straight jacket that will no doubt be administered by people who are unfamiliar with and even opposed to natural medicine. The apparent intention is to drive people towards pharmaceutical-based medicine. It is worth noting that modern medical misadventure and misprescription is the third leading cause of death—hardly a direction that deserves a monopoly.
The logic of insisting on total government control of medical choice escapes me. It fits with a perspective that has been steadily growing throughout the pandemic: the government is seeking to control every aspect of life and impose a kind of uniformity on the nation. This originates from a distorted one size fits all view of reality. Diversity is actually a great source of progress and happiness, not something to be stamped out—a discredited communistic perspective.
It is rather curious that for two years the government has been denying there is any connection between serious illness and mRNA vaccination despite tens of thousands of instances of illness proximate to inoculation and studies showing a statistical connection, as well as plausible biomolecular mechanisms. In contrast, on account of a very, very small handful of unproven historical complaints about natural health products, despite widespread safe use, they wish to control what we eat and what health choices we can make.
Whichever side of the vaccine debate you are on, it should be clear that the government cannot have it both ways. They can’t apply different and incompatible logic as it suits their agenda. All the more curious when many vaccine injured and long Covid sufferers are relying on natural health products to help get them through conditions which many of our medical professionals deny exist.
Last night I spoke to a medical doctor who described how his comments on the benefits of Vitamin C and D have been censored by his colleagues and officials. No surprise really, doctors only spend an hour or two learning about the principles of nutrition during the entire course of their long training. One of his colleagues told him the only benefit of vitamins is to change the colour of urine. That just about says it all. James Lind, who found that lemons cure scurvy, must be turning in his grave.
There is in fact no reasonable rationale for introducing restrictions on Natural Health Products, they are not harming anyone and studies show that many of them have significant benefits for health. The introduction of the new law will cost a lot and it will be paid for by financial levies on manufacturers, importers, suppliers, practitioners, and retailers. A single company selling 300 products, each making two health claims, will be liable for as much as $3 million in government charges. Ultimately these costs will be passed onto the public making natural health products unaffordable.
What the Bill Doesn’t Do
Gradually over the last few years, synthetic flavours and additives have been turning up in processed supermarket items. If you are buying vanilla ice cream, it is now usually labelled as containing natural vanilla flavour. This is not in fact made from natural vanilla beans, it is a synthetic flavour. The use of the term “natural” is intended to disguise this fact. In 2016 our Ministry of Health approved over 3,000 synthetic ingredients, many of them without safety testing. The Therapeutic Products Bill will do nothing to correct the sleight of hand that is describing synthetic additives with an unknown safety profile as ‘natural’. I discuss many of the ways synthetic additives are affecting health in my book Your DNA Diet.
Nor will the Bill encourage the distribution of information about natural approaches to health that studies show are very beneficial in controlling common serious health conditions. Advice for example about diet, exercise, and the curbing of unhealthy habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, or ultra processed foods. Changes in lifestyle can be very influential in reducing cardiac problems as this BBC interview reports. Many other serious health condition outcomes could be improved in this way including cancer, obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.
If the government wishes to encourage improvements in health and longevity, it would do well to launch a public education programme about natural health products and approaches rather than seek to limit their use.
What You Can Do
If we wish to be able to continue to freely choose natural health options, herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up. Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th. Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the sale and use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use. Moreover, it will put many NZ businesses out of action. I could say a lot more but now is the time for all of us to have a go and hold up our hands. If we don’t, we will only have ourselves to blame. Given the short submission time available, we have to take a scattershot approach, contact as many people as you can and explain how this is going to seriously affect their health options now and down the line.
TN has examined this topic in detail several times. Ultimately, the only people who will be able to hop on the Internet, regardless of the entry point (5G, 6G, fiber optic, private of public WiFi) will first have to be definitively identified. This will require a personal, registered ID comparable to an electronic passport. No digital ID? You don’t use the Internet. Got ID? Every activity is tracked, catalogued and saved. The military is paving the way for this. ⁃ TN Editor
The Defense Department has finally laid out its plan for protecting its cyber networks after years of pledging to make it a commitment.
The Office of the Chief Information Officer released “The DoD Zero Trust Strategy” in November — which laid out metrics and deadlines for the department to achieve full zero trust adoption by 2027. Cybersecurity experts said the government and private sector should work together to leverage resources to successfully enter the new regime.
“Cyber physical threats to critical infrastructure really are one of our biggest national security challenges that we’re facing today, and that the landscape that we’re dealing with has gotten more complex,” Nitin Natarajan, deputy director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a MeriTalk event in October.
Cyber attackers have more resources than they have in the past, and it’s less expensive to do a lot of damage to an unsecure system, he said. It’s not just lone wolf hackers, but nation states and cyber terrorists who can pose a threat.
For example, the 2019 SolarWinds cyber attack, which swept past the defenses of thousands of organizations, including the federal government, has been linked to Russia-backed operatives.
The new strategy’s basic tenet is that treating organizations’ security like a moat around a castle doesn’t keep out bad actors.
“Mission and system owners, as well as operators, increasingly embrace this view as fact. They also see the journey to [zero trust] as an opportunity to affect positively the mission by addressing technology modernizations, refining security processes and improving operational performance,” the document said.
Zero trust culture requires every person within a network to assume that it is already compromised and requires all users to prove their identities at all times.
The strategy lists technologies that can help cultivate a zero trust environment such as continuous multi-factor authentication, micro-segmentation, advanced encryption, endpoint security, analytics and robust auditing.
While these various technologies can be used to implement this basic premise, it essentially means that “users are granted access to only the data they need and when needed.”
The strategy revolves around four pillars: accepting the culture of zero trust, operationalizing zero trust practices, accelerating zero trust technology and department-wide integration. The strategy notes that while IT departments across the Pentagon may need to purchase products, there is no one capability that can solve all their problems.
“While the objectives prescribe ‘what’ shall be done in furtherance of the goal, they do not prescribe ‘how,’ as DoD Components may need to undertake objectives in differing ways,” the strategy read.
For the technology pillar, the Pentagon’s zero trust strategy calls for capabilities to be pushed out faster while reducing silos. Capabilities that promote simpler architecture and efficient data management are also important, according to the document.
While many methods can be used to authenticate users, the integration pillar calls for creating an acquisition plan for technologies that can be scaled department-wide by early fiscal year 2023.
One technology development already underway is the Thunderdome, a $6.8 million contract awarded to Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this year. The technology would protect access to the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network, the Pentagon’s classified information transmitter, according to a Defense Information Systems Agency press release.
It won’t be possible to completely retrofit every legacy platform with technology such as multi-factor authentication, the strategy points out. However, the services can implement safeguards for these less modern systems in the interim.
The securing information systems pillar will also require automating artificial intelligence operations and securing communications at all levels.
Automating systems is an important part of zero trust, said Andy Stewart, senior federal strategist at digital communications company Cisco Systems and a former director at Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. Tenth Fleet. If the processes behind zero trust don’t work well, people can struggle to use the technology and adopt the zero trust mindset.
“Zero trust is about raising the security, but it also means, ‘How do I operate more efficiently?’” he said. “The user experience should get a vote.”
While the strategy marks a turning point for the effort, the Pentagon started down the road of zero trust years ago. Its 2019 Digital Modernization Strategy mentioned that zero trust was an emerging initiative concept it was “exploring.”
Accepting more rigorous cybersecurity measures through the zero trust mindset is something the Marine Corps has been working on through education and raising awareness, said Renata Spinks, assistant director and deputy chief information officer of information, command, control, communications and computers and acting senior information security officer.
“We spend a lot of time educating, because if people know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it … it has been my experience that they will get on board a whole lot sooner than resisting,” she said
The 2021 zero trust mandate from President Joe Biden’s administration was “a godsend” because it gave justification for personnel inside the Marine Corps who may not have understood the necessity of some of the IT initiatives, she said.
A successful zero trust implementation will reduce threats to some of the most critical types of capabilities that warfighters will be relying on in the future: cloud, artificial intelligence and command, control, communications, computer and intelligence.
The military needs the help of defense contractors to protect sensitive data, Spinks noted. Industry can help the military’s IT personnel understand how to work with the type of data that they will be providing and to how much the military will need access.
“Zero trust will not be zero trust successfully if we don’t get help in managing identities,” she said.
The Marine Corps recently hired a service data officer who could use input from contractors about how much access the military will need to figure out the best ways to classify and manage the service’s data, she noted.
Having access to secure data anywhere will help military members and personnel in the defense industrial base who are working outside of business hours and in remote locations, according to the Pentagon’s strategy.
The push for zero trust is different from some cybersecurity initiatives because it has muscle behind it, Spinks added. Leadership has provided policies and procedures and are willing to be held accountable, she said.
“Cybersecurity is not an inexpensive venture. But I think what truly drives it is the vicious adversary and all of the activity across not just the federal government, but even at the state and local levels,” she said.
Better cybersecurity practices will also be needed to secure supply chains, Natarajan noted. Making them more resilient, especially in critical technologies such as semiconductors, has been a focus at the Pentagon in recent years.
“We know that this is being used by malicious cyber actors really to exploit a lot of third party risk after going after an organization’s supply chain,” he said.
That’s another reason why the government can’t work alone, he added.
“As we look at this, we’re looking at this not just from a sector perspective but also looking at this from national critical functions,” he said.
CISA released cybersecurity performance goals for companies to measure themselves in October. Though the performance goals don’t cite zero trust specifically, the goals are intended for companies to use regardless of their size.
“We’re really looking at these to be that minimum baseline of cyber protections that will reduce the rest of critical infrastructure operators,” he said. “But at the end of the day, by doing that we’re also impacting national security and the health and safety of Americans throughout the nation.”
The private sector in turn needs the government’s investment in education and resources to build up its cyber workforce.
“Cyberspace involves not just the hardware and software, the technology, your tablets, your iPhones, your technology, but it involves people. People developed cyberspace. People use cyberspace. We are in cyberspace,” Kemba Walden, principal deputy director of the National Cyber Director’s Office, said during the MeriTalk event.
Not yet at full operating capacity, the National Cyber Director’s Office was established in 2021 to take the lead on cyber issues at the federal level, including the first national cybersecurity strategy.
Just as important as the broad strategy will be the national workforce and education document that will be released after the cybersecurity strategy, Walden said.
“We took a look and recognized that 700,000 or so U.S. jobs with the word cyber in it are left unfilled,” she said. That number comes from market research firm Lightcast’s 2022 report based on 2021 data.
“As a national cyber and national security lawyer, that frightens me,” she said. “That is a national security risk from my perspective.”
In recent years, organizations such as Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and the National Security Association’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center have sprung up to gauge the needs and collect feedback from large enterprises, she said.
“Those are the types of collaborative efforts that I think are necessary in order to evolve public-private collaboration and information sharing overall,” she said.
Ultimately, the benefits of zero trust trickle down to the warfighter, according to the document.
For example, the Pentagon’s joint all-domain command and control effort — which aims to link sensors and shooters while using artificial intelligence to make decisions — relies on that data being secure. If it falls into the wrong hands, military leaders can’t achieve information dominance, the strategy notes.
“We need to make certain that when malicious actors attempt to breach our zero trust defenses; they can no longer roam freely through our networks and threaten our ability to deliver maximum support to the warfighter,” Chief Information Officer John Sherman said in the strategy.
NOTE: The interview with Mark Steele begins at 5:30 minutes.
An interesting interview, in which researcher and activist, Mark Steele joined the SGT Report to talk about some of the weapons’ systems being used to undermine civilian populations currently. Mark’s website: https://www.saveusnow.org.uk/
VIDEO AT THE LINK (Transcript below, note the transcript refers to some products that are not named but are pictured in the video)
What does the public want?
The public are aware that research findings on diet, nutrition, and lifestyle indicate that there are proven health benefits.
Over 50% of the public use natural health products and alternative approaches to health care.
The public realise there are many traditional sources of information about what products can be used safely.
If an individual suffers from a chronic or serious illness, or simply wants to maintain health, they need to retain their options to research and choose the most effective treatment for them.
The new bill will regulate all natural health products that claim to benefit health.
This is an enabling bill. As a result, the government will appoint a regulator who will then decide for you what products can be sold and what health claims can be made.
Well, what will the regulator decide?
In 2016, the Ministry of Health published a draft list of 5500 approved and all restricted ingredients. Most likely, the decisions of the new regulator, when appointed, will be based on this list.
Let’s answer the public’s first question.
Are all these ingredients safe?
The 2016 Ministry of Health permitted list included 3000 synthetic and chemical additives.
A closer look shows that the permitted list includes many additives which are suspected of causing illness and cancer. Including:
FD&C red No. 2
Amaranth, No. 3
Erythrosine No. 4
Ponceau
All are banned in the USA by the FDA.
A 2007 study in the UK found a possible link between six food dyes, a preservative and hyperactivity in children. All these compounds are likely to be permitted by the bill.
Thousands of artificial fragrances and flavours have been approved, even though they have not been tested properly.
Here’s an example of a pre-approved synthetic product. This cheap popular drink is available in New Zealand supermarkets. All of its ingredients have already been approved by the Ministry of Health.
These include:
Sugar: which predisposes to obesity and aggravates diabetes
E330 Synthetic citric acid
Synthetic raspberry flavour, effects unknown.
E211 sodium benzoate: implicated as a possible cause of hyperactivity when used with E122
Colour E122 Carmoisine: banned in the United States, Sweden, Norway and Austria
Artificial sweetener E961 Neotame: similar to aspartame and banned in organic products. US FDA application noted adverse reactions. Dr. Mercola recommends this be avoided at all costs.
This bill will allow this synthetic product to be marketed as a natural health product.
We’re talking about serious health issues here. During the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a huge expansion in chronic diseases, including cancers, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and other mental and physical illnesses.
No one knows the exact causes but poor nutrition food, food additives and environmental pollution are all suspected.
Over 2000 new chemicals are registered each year. There’s been a rapid expansion in the use of chemicals in food and synthetic chemicals. Many of these have been approved without sufficient scrutiny.
Using discredited principles such as substantial equivalence additives that are similar to but slightly different from natural compounds have been approved in though is well known that very small differences in chemical structure can cause serious side effects.
The bill requires the regulation of entirely natural ingredients already known to be safe, in other words, foods.
Under the bill, all ingredients have to be pre-approved. We estimate a supplier will pay $200 annually for each ingredient.
The probable minimal cost of making a health claim on the label will be $5,000 to the regulator for each application. And for each mild condition, your product claims to benefit.
But you will not be allowed to claim that a natural health product can benefit a serious health condition.
If it is considered that your product has therapeutic value, you will pay around $100,000 to register it as a medicine. And only a medical doctor will be allowed to prescribe it.
An EU report found that natural health products are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs; Despite this, suppliers will have to comply with pharmaceutical style regulations and undertake frequent costly testing of ingredients and products.
Say you’re selling 300 product products to the public, and each one benefits two mild conditions; the application fees alone will be $3 million before you’ve even begun to prepare your evidence.
The experience in Australia has been that the preparation of a single application can cost in excess of $100,000.
These restrictions are so costly that most suppliers will simply refrain from making health claims, so you’ll have less information. Many will go out of business.
The net effect of these regulations will be that consumers will have less information than they did before.
Restrictions on scientific information regarding serious illness
Did you know that the simple kitchen spice turmeric is effective in preventing bowel cancer?
There are a lot of studies.
New Zealand has one of the highest death rates from bowel cancer in the developed world.
Studies show that garlic, ginger, turmeric, thyme, rosemary, sage, spearmint, and peppermint all inhibit the growth of colon cancer cells.
A study found that 1/3 of patients with end stage bowel cancer for whom no other treatment options existed, improved after treatment with turmeric extract.
If the bill is passed, I would not be allowed to tell you this and could be liable for a substantial fine.
So there are restrictions on free speech
It has been proven for years that garlic benefits healthy heart conditions. No one selling garlic will be allowed to communicate this factual scientific information. Thereby the bill will restrict free speech and suppress matters of fact.
There’ll be restrictions on health claims
A consignment of this product, Vicks vapour rub, was seized by Medsafe. Officials in May 2016 and destroyed because the Label made this unapproved health claim:
Apply to the chest, throat, and back for 3-way relief from blocked nose, cough, and body ache.
Thousands of products could be snagged by this rule.
Restrictions on dose
In 2016 the Ministry of Health believed that the maximum daily dose of vitamin B 12 should be 50 micrograms. This product, vitamin B 12, is commonly used by people who are deficient. It has hit each dose 20 times the maximum daily dose specified by the Ministry of Health. So it could be banned.
A typical Indian or Thai meal may contain 50 grams of tamarind. The maximum daily dose of tamarind that has been permitted by the bill is 500 milligrams, that is 100 times smaller than the amount you might consume in a meal.
Civil servants have been employed to make up this ridiculous rule and hundreds more like it.
Banned ingredients
Even though this traditional coffee substitute contains only natural plants, it will be banned by the bill because it contains an ingredient that is listed under the medicines act.
A sort of reverse patenting that bans herbs if they are used to make medicines.
Hundreds of traditional remedies will disappear.
Neem is one of the world’s most revered traditional healing plants with many medical uses. Among its many uses, it reduces inflammation associated with internal ulcers. It’s so effective that pharmaceutical companies have tried to patent this plant.
The regulator is likely to classify this herb as suitable for external use only. Effectively banning its traditional use for no reason.
This popular form of vitamin C could be banned because it contains a derivative of lecithin (commonly used in chocolate and other supermarket products), which in 2016, was classified by the Ministry of Health as for “external use only“.
Restrictions on traditional Indian and Chinese medicine
The bill will empower the regulator to restrict the traditional practices of ethnic communities, and it will violate the Bill of Rights.
More than 150 commonly used Indian herbs and a similar number of Chinese herbs were wrongly placed on a not permitted list by the Ministry of Health in 2016.
To a large extent, this is because many traditional herbs have been found to be so healthy, that they have been used to develop medicines and therefore these ingredients will be restricted in natural health products.
There are more than 10,000 traditional healing herbs. It will cost more than $100 million to register their healing properties, so in effect, their use will likely cease in New Zealand.
Just look at this list. This is just a short extract from 300 herbs that the Ministry of Health sought to restrict in 2016. The last time they tried to introduce a bill of this type.
These are foods that we consume many of us regularly, why should they be restricted it doesn’t make any sense.
What will it cost you
And these restrictions are going to cost a lot. Last week a 50 gram packet of Rubia Cordifolia, a herb used to make healthy tea cost $12.
After the bill is passed, the same packet may cost 60 to $80, just due to the compliance clock costs.
There are over 100,000 eligible plants. It will take an army of civil servants years to classify even a small proportion of them.
Assessment costs will be paid by the manufacturing industry so the cost of natural health products will obviously rise dramatically.
What will escape regulation
Well, many unhealthy products will be allowed to be sold without regulation.
Sugary Drinks, hard fat, synthetic flavours, and alcohol will continue to be sold unimpeded….
while the government pours millions of dollars and years of fruitless effort into controlling products that are already known to be safe and healthy foods.
This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t immoral and criminal.
There is absolutely no need for the government to regulate natural foods that are based on DNA that are used in natural health products.
Natural foods and herbs should be automatically excluded from regulation. There is no need to do this.
Meanwhile, there is a crisis in healthcare
Medical misadventure, experimentation and interventions have just become the number one cause of death in the world.
Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control.
Mental illness has quadrupled.
Cancers, chronic diseases, heart disease, and many other conditions are increasing to epidemic proportions, all cause mortality is rising.
Clearly something has gone horribly wrong. But no one knows quite why.
There is no doubt that food additives and the drugs we take play a pivotal role in the development of disease.
There have been multiple failures in the regulatory processes which approve agricultural practices food and medicine.
How has this happened?
The process of regulation has moved away from science and becomes a cosy relationship between industry and regulators permitting unsafe and inappropriate products onto the market.
The bill, the proposed, bill represents a new phase of this cosy relationship. Regulators worldwide are cooperating to place restrictions on natural health products. And this will only benefit multinational companies.
What can we do to reverse this trend?
There is a scientific standard scientific approach to identify cause
Eliminate suspected causal factors and reintroduce them one by one.
Dr. Dee Mangin at Otago Medical School, has found that if you stop all non-essential medication for the elderly, their health improves.
Dr. Julia Rutledge at Canterbury University has found that greatly improved nutrition benefits children with ADHD.
Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, a renowned San Diego neurologist, has found that her patients, including MS sufferers, improved dramatically when placed on a traditional herbal diet.
These are just pointers to the many scientific preventive approaches to health care, which are springing up everywhere based on natural foods.
So why is our parliament planning to restrict natural health products?
We need to remind ourselves there is no evidence that natural health products are unsafe.
In fact, there’s a great deal of evidence that they benefit health and prevent illness.
Natural health products are traditionally made from plants and animal products which are based on DNA and natural minerals.
Our digestive system has developed to easily metabolise food based on DNA without side effects.
Many people rely on natural health products to maintain their health. It will be criminally negligent to restrict their options.
True natural health products are in fact foods.
There is nothing risky about their use.
Taking natural health products is no different from the need to have a balanced meal.
Food is life. It is our first medicine.
The healing properties of plants are proven to benefit public health. Our right to use them should not be taken away by law and transferred to pharmaceutical interests.
We are a people here who believe in fairness.
This is not the time for New Zealand to become involved in an international effort to subvert regulatory safeguards.
This is not the time to restrict access to preventive health care.
This is not the time to allow suspected unhealthy synthetic ingredients to be included in natural health products.
This is not the time to restrict access to herbs and impose huge unjustified costs on traditional medicine.
This is a time for New Zealand to lead the world in the development of application of preventive approaches to health care.
The therapeutic products bill is currently up for public submissions up until February 15, 2023. Make a submission here.
Ask your MP to review this presentation, which shows that the bill relies upon outdated and discredited ideas.
Or you can contact me directly at my email ghatchard@gmail.com or go to my website for more information. Thank you
Guy Hatchard, Ph.D., was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID, a food testing and certification company (now known as FoodChain ID).
From James Roguski @ substack via Dr Ana Maria Mihalcea
They are meeting again shortly in secret to discuss a further thinning down of your basic human rights …this is very important info to share as widely as possible … as indicated below with this short opening excerpt… EWR
A must watch video from an indigenous perspective. It questions the entire so called ‘science’ of GE. In it, from NZ the late Moana Jackson cites US activist the late John Trudell as saying ‘the New World Order is the Old World lie’. Couldn’t agree more. EWR
Funded by The Ford Foundation and screened on Maori TV, the film takes its title from a prescient folk tale of natural misinformation and explores the murky world of genetic sampling, engineering and ownership and its explicit links to a far from dormant colonialism.
Focusing on the economic, ethical and legal issues around exploitation of blood samples from first-nation islanders in Oceania, the film uses impressionistic image collages, effective scoring, archive footage and creative graphics to trace a centuries-old lineage of abuse and to argue for an alternative, interdependent worldview based on collaboration and ancient wisdom. Ambitious and provocative, the film is a welcome and timely search for values and worth in a desert of corporate sprawl.
It inspires audiences to ask serious questions of the collective illusion we call ‘progress’ sending a powerful message about the need for indigenous peoples to shift the focus of resistance away from reacting to the arguments of the biotech promoters. Instead, they should be reclaiming their own arguments and finding their own ways to restore the health of their communities.
A former lobbyist at Coca-Cola has come forward with bombshell information about the junk food corporation’s deceptive, racist, and potentially criminal behavior.
Calley Means, who worked on behalf of The Coca-Cola Company in years past, says the multinational purveyor of poison “food” paid the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to slander as “racist” any and all scientists, researchers, or other “opponents” whose work exposed Coke products as toxic.
Coke also paid off willing parties to produce pseudoscience “debunking” the link between soft drink consumption and diseases like obesity and diabetes. (Related: Ten years ago, Coca-Cola tried to boost sales by marketing its high-fructose corn syrup [HFCS]-laden junk food soft drinks as healthy for breakfast.)
“Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding,” Means recently revealed. “I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room.”
“The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP and other civil rights groups to call opponents racist. Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation – both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association (ABA).”
In 2011 when the idea of soda taxes really started to gain legislative traction, Coke amped up the slander and bribery agenda. Means says the conversations he heard within the walls of Coca-Cola corporate were “depressingly transactional.”
“We (Coke) will give you money,” Means recalls about the typical conversations that would take place internally between Coke and its target allies. “You need to paint opponents of us as racist.”
As silly as it all sounds, these tactics worked. As the Farm Bill for 2011-2013 was being negotiated and finalized, thousands of articles flooded the news cycle that helped Coke avert soda taxes and possible removal from the food stamp program.
Aggressive lobbying and slander allowed Coke to lie to the public that soda pop is “one of the cheapest ways to get calories”
Means says Coca-Cola also partnered with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to funnel money into “academia,” which used it to produce “research” claiming that soda taxes would harm low-income populations.
“I watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities – as well as think tanks on the left and right – to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor,” Means says.
“They also paid for studies that say drinking soda didn’t cause obesity.”
Coke was also able to get away with making the false and ludicrous claim that its soft drink products are “one of the cheapest ways to get calories,” which Means describes as “a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.”
It was none other than the ABA that aided Coke in purveying the lie that taxing soda pop would hurt not just poor people but also “local businesses” while “unfairly targeting one product.”
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is also complicit in this racket, having put forth more lies claiming that “there are no bad foods, only bad diets.”
The entire regulatory structure of the United States has clearly been co-opted by Big Industry, which is steering all the “science” in its own favor. Coca-Cola is just one example among many of what an absolute joke this entire system has become – and that some would argue always was.
“The word ‘racist’ has lost all its meaning,” wrote a commenter about Coke’s flagrant abuse of the English language. “The word has been so overused that it lost its meaning.”
More news stories like this one can be found at RaceWar.news.
You have just over a month to make a submission folks. This is a time worn tactic… timing is everything. The ridiculous thing too is, some of these items are common cooking ingredients! And comfrey, well I’ve just recently been wondering why am I not seeing that useful plant as much as I used to. Do you really still trust your leaders? How does this move promote the health & well being of NZ citizens? It doesn’t. It promotes the interests of those folk who meet at Davos, currently seeking to force more of their ‘safe and effectives’ upon you. EWR
From hatchardreport.com
Natural Products Regulation—An Overreach of Government Control
Civilisations come and go through the ages. When governments empower people, they harness the intelligence and creativity of their citizens for the good of all; when they seek to control their populations, they fall into decline.
Following three years of pandemic control, governments are not stopping there. Here in New Zealand, the government has introduced the “Therapeutic Products Bill,” which will control how products which appear to benefit health are manufactured, prescribed, imported, advertised, supplied and exported. According to Health Minister Andrew Little:
“It will enable New Zealand to take advantage of advances in medicine, such as cell and tissue therapies, emerging gene therapies, and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning software. Having risk-proportionate approval systems will improve access to necessary and life-saving medicines, such as vaccines in a pandemic.”
An important part of the bill aims to regulate the natural health products used by more than 50% of our population. This is the third attempt of the Labour Party to introduce extreme regulation of the public’s options to choose their medical care, supplements and diet. Their earlier two attempts failed because of vocal public opposition. In 2017 Labour opted for a prohibited list of 300 common herbal ingredients ( for some of these see photo):
Control of Our Food Supply
It won’t have escaped your notice that many of these like Cinnamon and Mustard are currently sold in shops. So how on earth did they get onto a prohibited list? The answer lies in attempts to gain control of our food supply.
Natural products that are beneficial to health cannot be patented, but synthetic copies can be. To make this work, the products that grow in gardens need to be banned.
Labour and the Ministry of Health did not make this list up, the list was supplied by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) of which Medsafe is a member. ICMRA is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry whose interests they serve. You can read all about it in my book Your DNA Diet, available as a Kindle from Amazon or a hard copy from the Hatchard Report.
Labour says it has learned from prior public opposition. This time the Bill will not name any prohibited ingredients. Instead is an enabling bill, the type of legislation made famous by Adolf Hitler. The Bill establishes a new regulator headed by an independent statutory officer with a wide remit:
The new regulator will be responsible for ensuring the safety, quality, and efficacy of natural products. It will design and implement proportionate, risk-based market authorisation pathways. Its functions will include, in addition to market authorisation, licensing controlled activities, post-market surveillance, and compliance.
These services will be funded through levies on the industry which are liable to be costly. Government regulatory schemes mooted in the last two attempts were likely to push small players out of the market due to the cost of compliance, as happened as a result of the Food Bill.
Crucially the Bill also includes a range of modern enforcement tools allowing for a graduated and proportionate response to breaches, including tiered criminal offences, strict liability offences, improved infringement notices and a civil pecuniary penalty regime.
In other words, the Bill appoints a new, as yet, unnamed regulator who is being empowered to do whatever he thinks fit to control the manufacture and availability of supplements. He could and is, in fact, very likely to publish a list of banned herbal ingredients soon after his appointment. The list is ready to go from the ICMRA database connected to Medsafe, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry.
If we wish to be able to continue to freely chose herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up. Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th. Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use.
In a fair world, Aruna Rodrigues would be heralded as an incredible individual for her ongoing struggle to protect the socio-economic and environmental integrity of India. So says respected environmentalist, author and campaigner Leo Saldanha, GMWatch reported.
He adds: “Since 2005, she has tirelessly pursued a public interest litigation before the Supreme Court of India, in which she has made a case why India should not yield to pressures from mega agri-transnational corporations and certain sections of the Indian agricultural sector who are keen on promoting genetically modified organisms in farming.”
India’s apex regulatory body, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee, recently sanctioned genetically modified (GM) mustard for cultivation. This would be India’s first GM food crop, despite a public interest litigation (PIL) before the Supreme Court to prevent cultivation as well as the widespread rejection of GM mustard by farmers’ organisations.
Aruna Rodrigues, the lead petitioner of the PIL, has exposed in her various submissions to court that claims about yield increases through GM mustard to be completely baseless. She indicates how data has been rigged and manipulated and protocols have been severely compromised, and that the government and its regulators are parroting the false claims of the crop developers.
Thanks to the PIL, the Supreme Court put a stay on the commercial release of GM Mustard on 3 November 2022.
Independent experts who have looked at the biosafety data submitted by the crop developer at Delhi University have clearly pointed out that GM mustard has not been tested rigorously and adequately.
India is a centre for diversity for mustard and several high-level official committees have recommended against transgenic technologies in crops for which the country is the centre of origin or centre of diversity.
Various high-level reports have also advised against introducing GM food crops to India per se. These reports conclude that GM crops are unsuitable for India and that biosafety and regulatory procedures are wholly inadequate.
Rodrigues also played a leading role in preventing commercial cultivation of GM brinjal more than a decade ago. Her tireless efforts have been a thorn in the side of global agritech corporations and seriously compromised regulatory officials who have for the best part of two decades been trying to get GM food crops cultivated in India.
There is much at stake.
India has a lot to lose, not least its food and seed sovereignty and contamination of its crops as well as the risks genetically modified organisms (GMOs) pose to human health.
The industry has much to gain.
Global biotech corporations like Bayer and Corteva are seeking to increase their control over the future of food and farming by extensively patenting plants and developing a new generation of GMOs.
They seek to claim all plants with those genetic traits as their ‘invention’. Such patents on plants would restrict farmers’ access to seeds and impede breeders from developing new plants as both would have to ask for consent and pay fees to the biotech companies.
According to an October 2022 report, the global GM crop and seed market is projected to reach $46 billion by 2027. That is up from an estimated US$30.6 billion in 2020. The US market is estimated at $8.4 billion, while China is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$10 billion by the year 2027.
Key global players include AgReliant Genetics LLC, BASF SE, Bayer Crop Science, Canterra Seeds Holdings, DLF Seeds & Science and Corteva (Dow/DuPont).
If India succumbs to pressure, that figure of $46 billion by 2027 could be much larger. With 1.4 billion people, India represents a massive financially lucrative cash cow.
For instance, Goldstein Research pushes pro-GM industry talking points and laments about resistance to GM food seeds as it is hindering the growth of India’s GM seed market. Even so, it forecasts that the Indian GM seed market is set to reach US$13.1 billion by 2025 (cotton is the only legally sanctioned GM crop in India at this time).
GM mustard is regarded as a pioneering food crop in India – it would open the floodgates for many other GM food crops that are in the pipeline under a veil of secrecy, including wheat, rice, brinjal and chickpea.
But – it seems – genuine science stands in the way. GM mustard is unwanted, unneeded and fails to stand up to scientific rigour.
Maybe that is why, in December 2022, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) prevented serving and former public officials from expressing any opinion or writing any article on the approval to release GM mustard. This is a ‘gag order’ and an attempt to close down debate on the matter and to keep the public in the dark on the issue.
Trade and agriculture policy specialist Devinder Sharma says that silencing scientific voices indicates there is more to hide than reveal. He says that every claim that the ICAR makes about GM mustard can be challenged. And it has been – in court. Sharma adds that the US is placing tremendous pressure on India to embrace GM crops.
In finishing, let us turn to where this article began – with Aruna Rodrigues.
Leo Saldanha, who is mentioned at the start of this article, is forthright on the Change.org website in condemning a recent attack on Rodrigues.
Due to Rodrigues, Saldanha says, the Supreme Court has time and again questioned the enthusiasm with which the Indian government and several public institutions have collaborated, questionably and controversially, in promoting GM foods and crops.
Just before Christmas, however, Aruna Rodrigues was unexpectedly forcibly evicted from her ancestral home by the Indian army. The Defence Estate Office is the custodian of all military properties of India and is required to secure such properties by following the due process of law.
Saldanha notes that Rodrigues’ home has been with her family from 1892 – legally secured via proper sale deeds. But about 27 years ago, the Defence Estate Office made a claim on the house. This claim was challenged, and the matter has been in court since then. Consequently, any action against the occupant should be only through due process of law.
On 20 December 2022, a court ruled that Aruna Rodrigues has occupation rights to the house. Yet the Defence Estate Officer moved into the house with army personnel – without any court directive – and physically removed her and threw the contents of the house onto the street. Within hours, a court ruled in Rodrigues favour. By then, however, the damage had been done.
As Saldanha says, we can only wonder whether any of this is connected to Rodrigues’ case before the Supreme Court. Given the billions of dollars at stake for the global agritech companies, it would indeed be wise to wonder.
Colin Todhunter is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization with an interest in food, agriculture and development issues.
Note: due to greater censorship now, I am finding that many links disappear or lead to error pages. I am therefore reproducing articles in their entirety rather than one or two paragraphs with a link to the source. Please contact me if I’ve reproduced your article in this way and you are not ok with it. EWR
New research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology reveals that in 2020 alone, some 74 metric tons of microplastics – that is, the plastic particulates released from waste into the environment – fell on the city of Auckland in New Zealand via rainfall.
The first peer-reviewed study of its kind to calculate the total mass of microplastics in a city’s air, the paper found that the pollution equivalent of three million plastic bottles falls on Auckland in an average year – a truly astounding level that is much higher than generally accepted estimates.
Researchers say the global prevalence of airborne microplastics appears to be much higher than previously believed. Most of these particulates are too small to be seen with the naked eye, though scientists were able to identify them using a colored, light-emitting dye.
For analysis, researchers also applied heat treatment, which allowed them to calculate an aggregate mass of the particulates in terms of volume and tonnage. (Related: The average person consumes a credit card’s worth of microplastics every week in tainted food.)
“The smaller the size ranges we looked at, the more microplastics we saw,” said Joel Rindelaub, the study’s lead author and a chemical scientist at The University of Auckland. “This is notable because the smallest sizes are the most toxicologically relevant.”
Chances are you’re inhaling microplastics right now and don’t even know it
The smaller the size of a microplastic particulate, the easier time it has being inhaled and entering cells. If small enough, microplastics can even build up in vital organs such as the liver and cross the blood-brain barrier, accumulating in the brain.
In one square meter in one day in 2020, the average number of airborne plastics floating around Auckland was found to be 4,885. Comparatively for that same year in the same amount of space, London’s count was just 771.
A 2019 study that looked at the cities of Hamburg and Paris found that airborne plastics in that same one-square-meter space were 275 and 110, respectively.
“The discrepancy is largely because of the Auckland study’s inclusion of smaller size ranges, which were not part of previous research,” noted Bloomberg.
Rindelaub says that while more work needs to be done to quantify precisely how much plastic the average person is breathing in, it is clear from what we already know that inhalation of microplastics “is an important route of exposure” that cannot be ignored.
Since the 1950s when plastics first started being mass produced, some 8.3 billion metric tons of it have been generated. Of that, 79 percent has ended up in landfills or been dumped in the wild where it gradually breaks down and turns into microplastics.
“Once they enter the natural environment, they can pollute soil, kill wildlife and find their way into the food chain,” reports indicate.
In Auckland, the most-detected form of plastic was polyethylene, followed by polycarbonate. The former is a common packaging material while the latter is used in electrical and electronic appliances.
Since Auckland is located near the ocean and gets heavy winds from the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand’s North Island, it is speculated that this could be a reason why more microplastics are being detected there compared to other more inland cities in other parts of the world.
“The production of airborne microplastics from breaking waves could be a key part of the global transport of microplastics,” Rindelaub explained. “And it could help explain how some microplastics get into the atmosphere and are carried to remote places, like here in New Zealand.”
The world’s growing microplastics problem is much more serious than many people realize. To learn more about the dangers and toxicity of exposure, be sure to check out Microplastics.news.
Science and opinion have become increasingly conflated, in large part because of corporate influence. As we explain in “Science for Sale,” an investigative series by the Center for Public Integrity and co-published with Vice.com, industry-backed research has exploded — often with the aim of obscuring the truth — as government-funded science dwindles. Read more.
The lawyer, Darrell Grams, explained that Ford had been losing lawsuits filed by former auto mechanics alleging asbestos in brakes had given them mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. Grams asked Paustenbach, then a vice president with the consulting firm Exponent, if he had any interest in studying the disease’s possible association with brake work. A meeting cemented the deal.
Paustenbach, a prolific author of scientific papers who’d worked with Grams on Dow Corning’s defense against silicone breast-implant illness claims, had barely looked at asbestos to that point. “I really started to get serious about studying asbestos after I met Mr. Grams, that’s for sure,” Paustenbach testified in a sworn deposition in June 2015. Before that, he said, the topic “wasn’t that interesting to me.”
Thus began a relationship that, according to recent depositions, has enriched Exponent by $18.2 million and brought another $21 million to Cardno ChemRisk, a similar firm Paustenbach founded in 1985, left and restarted in 2003. All told, testimony shows, Ford has spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony concluding there is no evidence brake mechanics are at increased risk of developing mesothelioma. This finding, repeated countless times in courtrooms and law offices over the past 15 years, is an attempt at scientific misdirection aimed at extricating Ford from lawsuits, critics say.
“They’ve published a lot, but they’ve really produced no new science,” said John Dement, a professor in Duke University’s Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and an asbestos researcher for more than four decades. “Fifteen years ago, I thought the issue of asbestos risk assessment was pretty much defined. All they’ve accomplished is to try to generate doubt where, really, little doubt existed.”
The glut of corporate-financed science has yielded mixed results. Exponent had a role in jury trials won by Ford in St. Louis and Pittsburgh last year, for example, and in a trial Ford lost in Tennessee. Judges have noted the infusion of controversy into a subject that for many years was not controversial in the least. A veteran asbestos judge in Wayne County, Michigan, wrote in an opinion that he’d never encountered the argument that “the science was not there” on mesothelioma and brakes until he heard a case involving an Exponent witness.
The discord over brakes bankrolled by Ford “has, in certain cases, tipped the scales for the defendants with juries,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer Jon Ruckdeschel. “More frequently, it has been used by industry lawyers to increase the costs and burdens on the courts and sick mechanics by creating a tidal wave of pre-trial litigation regarding the ‘science.’ ”
A troubling history
Over the past decade 109 physicians, scientists and academics from 17 countries have signed legal briefs affirming that asbestos in brakes can cause mesothelioma. The World Health Organization and other research and regulatory bodies maintain that there is no safe exposure level for asbestos and that all forms of the mineral — including the most common one, chrysotile, found in brakes — can produce mesothelioma.
Worries about brakes as a source of disease go back decades. A 1971 Ford memo shows that while the company didn’t believe brake dust unleashed by mechanics contained significant amounts of asbestos, it already was exploring alternatives to asbestos brake linings. One of them, made of metal and carbon, performed well, the memo says, “but the cost penalty is severe ($1.25/car just for front-end brakes).”
A Ford spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. In its 2014 annual report, the company said, “Most of the asbestos litigation we face involves individuals who claim to have worked on the brakes of our vehicles over the years. We are prepared to defend these cases, and believe that the scientific evidence confirms our long-standing position that there is no increased risk of asbestos-related disease as a result of exposure to the type of asbestos formerly used in the brakes on our vehicles.” Ford announced recently that it earned a record pretax profit of $10.5 billion in 2015.
Dennis Paustenbach (ICIJ.org)
A written statement to the Center for Public Integrity delivered on behalf of Paustenbach by a public-relations firm says, “Dennis was viewed as one of the leading risk assessment experts in the country, and was contacted by Ford because of his experience and expertise in this field. … As Dennis and others learned more about brake dust, it was clear that while there was considerable data on the subject, the scientific information had never been synthesized and analyzed.”
His conclusion after reviewing the scientific literature, according to the statement: “There is no credible study that has shown an increased risk of disease in auto mechanics.”
An Exponent vice president declined to comment. On its website, the 49-year-old firm, originally known as Failure Analysis Associates, says, “We evaluate complex human health and environmental issues to find cost-effective solutions. … By introducing a new way of thinking about an existing situation, we assist clients to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”
A Center review of abstracts on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed website turned up 10 articles on asbestos brakes co-authored by scientists affiliated with Exponent or Cardno ChemRisk since 2003. (The latter was known simply as ChemRisk until it was acquired by Brisbane, Australia-based Cardno in 2012). None of the articles reported an elevated risk of mesothelioma among vehicle mechanics.
Many physicians and scientists say, however, that these papers muddy the waters by drawing overly broad conclusions from earlier studies of workers who might have had no contact with asbestos brakes. “In the asbestos area the whole literature has been so warped by publications just supporting litigation,” said Dement, of Duke. “It has a real negative impact on pushing the science forward.” Dement said he has, on rare occasions, consulted for plaintiffs in the past 10 or 15 years, earmarking nearly all fees for the university.
In a 2007 article, two researchers at George Washington University — one of whom, David Michaels, now heads the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — reported finding six “litigation-generated” papers on asbestos and auto mechanics published from 1997 through 2001. In the ensuing five years, 20 such papers were published. All told, 18 of the 26 papers published from 1997 through 2006 were “written by experts primarily associated with defendants, while eight were written by experts who work primarily for plaintiffs … Sponsorship by parties involved in litigation leads to an imbalance in the literature … whoever is willing to fund more studies will have more studies published.”
Craig Biegel, a retired corporate defense lawyer in Oregon who represented plaintiffs later in his career, did an update of the Michaels paper as part of his doctoral dissertation. Biegel searched the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website using the words “asbestos” and “brake.” He found 27 articles written from 1998 to 2015 by experts known to work for industry; all, he said, showed either no elevated risk of mesothelioma among mechanics or minimal asbestos exposures.
He found 10 articles written by plaintiffs’ experts; all showed an association between the disease and brake work. And he found 11 articles written by foreign scientists, who, as far as he knew, were not involved in litigation. All but one showed an association or documented high asbestos exposures.
“As far as I’m concerned, both sides in a lawsuit do the same thing: They both fund research to obtain evidence for trial, not to advance science,” said Biegel, who once defended asbestos property-damage claims for a Fortune 500 company he declined to identify. “The only difference is that defense counsel have almost unlimited industry money and plaintiffs’ counsel do not want to spend their own money.”
Ford’s knowledge of asbestos
There are several ways microscopic asbestos fibers can be sent airborne and enter the human body during brake work. Over time, friction wears down brake linings and pads — many of which contained asbestos prior to the mid-1990s and some of which still do — and they need to be replaced. A mechanic who opened a brake drum would find it filled with fine dust from the decayed lining. The easiest and most common way to clean it out was to use compressed air, a technique that generates grayish, fiber-bearing clouds that can trigger disease years later if the worker is not properly protected. Many weren’t.
Other opportunities for exposure: filing, grinding or sanding brakes, or cleaning up work areas.
Ford wasn’t the only U.S. automaker to use asbestos brakes. General Motors and Chrysler did as well and found themselves in court as a result. Of the so-called Big Three, however, only Ford continues to get hit with mesothelioma lawsuits; GM and Chrysler are immune by virtue of their 2009 bankruptcies. “The extent of our financial exposure to asbestos litigation remains very difficult to estimate,” Ford said in its 2014 annual report. “Annual payout and defense costs may become significant in the future.”
Documents show Ford was mindful of concerns about asbestos brakes by the late 1960s. An unpublished report by an industrial hygienist with Ford of Britain in 1968 said that while brake linings at the time contained between 40 and 60 percent asbestos, field tests indicated dust that collected in brake drums had a low asbestos content because much of the material decomposed after repeated braking. Consequently, he wrote, there was no evidence that blowing out the drums presented a “significant hazard to health.”
The hygienist added, “It would be helpful, however, for clinical examinations to be made of some repair mechanics with long experience of brake cleaning to confirm this view. It would also be desirable to include in Service manuals a general instruction that inhalation of dust during brake cleaning should be minimised.”
A 1970 Ford memo titled “Asbestos Emissions from Brake Lining Wear” included a bibliography of 40 articles on the cancer-causing effects of asbestos, dating to 1954. And the same 1971 memo bemoaning the $1.25 cost of asbestos-free brakes noted that the state of Illinois was considering banning the use of asbestos in brake linings, beginning with the 1975 model year.
Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole holds up a photo during a news conference in Washington, Thursday, July 27, 1989, showing alleged asbestos violations at the Friction Division Products Inc. plant in Trenton, New Jersey. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had proposed fining the brake-shoe manufacturing company $2.7 million for exposing workers to potentially deadly levels of asbestos. Bob Daugherty/AP
In 1973, Ford began telling its own employees to use “an industrial type vacuum cleaner” to remove dust from brake drums. “Under no circumstances shall compressed air blowoff be used to clean brakes and brake drums,” the company said. It first told its dealers about what it called “a potential health hazard” in 1975.
In a court filing, Ford said it began putting “caution” labels on packages of asbestos-containing brakes and clutches in 1980; many mesothelioma victims who have sued the company say they never saw such labels. In the same document Ford said it began a “complete phase-out of asbestos-containing brake products” in the 1983 model year, starting with its Ranger pickup truck. A decade later, only Ford Mustangs and certain limousines were equipped with asbestos brakes; some asbestos-containing parts for older model-year vehicles were available until 2001through dealerships and authorized distributors.
That was the year lawyer Grams reached out to toxicologist Paustenbach to gauge his interest in studying mesothelioma in ex-mechanics. “I contacted Dr. Paustenbach because he is one of the leading professional experts in the world,” Grams, who no longer represents Ford, said in a brief phone interview. Grams said he had read none of the recent deposition testimony about the relationship between Ford and its two brake consultants, Cardno ChemRisk and Exponent.
In his curriculum vitae, Paustenbach, president of Cardno ChemRisk, says he is “a board-certified toxicologist and industrial hygienist with nearly 30 years of experience in risk assessment, environmental engineering, ecotoxicology and occupational health.” The 181-page CV shows he has worked on topics ranging from arsenic in wine to heavy metals in hip implants; authored or co-authored 271 peer-reviewed articles; and given 440 presentations at conferences. He is regularly retained as a defense expert in asbestos litigation and other toxic-tort cases.
Paustenbach offered a window into his thinking in a 2009 article written by a University of Virginia business professor.
“Without a doubt, a large percentage of environmental and occupational claims are simply bogus, intended only to extract money from those who society believes can afford to ‘share the wealth,’” Paustenbach told his interviewer. He said, “The vast majority of cases that I’ve seen were fraudulent with respect to the scientific merit and billions upon billions of dollars are redistributed annually inappropriately — at least from a scientific standpoint.
“… Nonetheless,” Paustenbach said, “I am a firm believer in the wisdom of juries and support giving generous awards to those that have been truly harmed by bad corporate behavior.”
In a 2010 letter to Dolores Nuñez Studier, a lawyer in the Ford general counsel’s office, Paustenbach claimed his firm’s papers had “changed the scientific playing field in the courtroom. You know this better than anyone as you have seen the number of plaintiff verdicts [in asbestos cases] decrease and the cost of settlement go down over time.”
In the letter, which surfaced in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, Paustenbach complained that the fee structure in place between Ford and Chemrisk was “out of date” and too low.
“Dolores, currently, you are among our largest clients,” he wrote. “And, Ford has certainly been a loyal supporter. The Big 3 [automakers] were the foundation of the firm during our formative years, and for this reason, I have tried to go the extra mile to satisfy your needs.”
Asked to explain the letter during a 2014 deposition, Paustenbach said he was merely emphasizing to Studier that “we invested in scientific research to answer questions that remained unanswered in the courtroom for many, many years …. And I was pretty proud of that.” He said he didn’t feel it was fair for his firm to lose money “when, in fact, I was so committed to getting the science straight.”
Creating doubt
The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. “Exposure to asbestos, including chrysotile, causes cancer of the lung, larynx and ovaries, and also mesothelioma (a cancer of the pleural and peritoneal linings) [and] asbestosis (fibrosis of the lungs),” the WHO says. “No threshold has been identified for the carcinogenic risk of asbestos, including chrysotile.”
OSHA says, “There is no ‘safe’ level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber. Asbestos exposures as short in duration as a few days have caused mesothelioma in humans.”
Taking the WHO and OSHA statements at face value, the case against asbestos would seem to be closed: Even someone with very low exposure to the mineral should worry.
In papers published over the past 15 years, however, scientists with Exponent, Cardno ChemRisk and other consulting firms have questioned whether brake mechanics truly are at heightened risk of developing mesothelioma, the disease that has fueled litigation against Ford and others.
A 2004 Exponent paper funded by Ford, GM and Chrysler, for example, concluded that “employment as a motor vehicle mechanic does not increase the risk of developing mesothelioma.” An update of that paper in 2015 found the same result. Each paper was a meta-analysis — an agglomeration of the results of multiple studies that, taken individually, may be too weak to indicate an effect.
In a deposition last October, Exponent’s Mary Jane Teta, a co-author of both meta-analyses, defended her firm’s findings. “I disagree when they say there is no safe level [of asbestos],” she testified. “I know the level of chrysotile … experienced by vehicle mechanics is safe.”
In his statement to the Center, Paustenbach wrote, “It is implausible that nearly 20 epidemiology studies” – on which he bases his legal opinions – “would conclude that there is no increased risk of mesothelioma for the time period during which brakes contained chrysotile asbestos if that were not the appropriate conclusion.”
The studies Paustenbach cites, however, are fraught with limitations, such as small sample sizes, vague job classifications and lack of exposure data. And not all of them found, as he put it, “no increased risk of mesothelioma” among mechanics. In a 1989 paper, for example, a Danish researcher who studied causes of death among auto mechanics reported finding a single case of mesothelioma among her subjects, where none would have been expected in the general population. As with other cancers, she wrote, this number was “too small to state or rule out a potentially increased risk.”
A co-author of another paper, Kay Teschke of the University of British Columbia, testified in a 2012 deposition that her research was being mischaracterized.
“Vehicle mechanics do many different things in their day; some might work on engines, some might only work on wheel alignment,” Teschke testified. “And when you dilute the [asbestos] exposure in that way, you can’t find the relationship with the job … It doesn’t mean that people in that job are somehow immune to the effects of the exposure … “
Christian Hartley, a lawyer in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who has represented about 100 mesothelioma victims in brake cases, said the papers used in the defense of such lawsuits “push all this data together that’s totally incomparable. That’s what gets reported in the literature and is used to persuade judges and some experts. It’s very misleading to think we have any kind of real handle on what a typical mechanic has for exposure.”
Dr. David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University and editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, argues that the papers are deceptive by design. Many reanalyze previously published studies of workers described as mechanics who may have had no contact with asbestos brakes, he said. The effect, Egilman said, is to dilute the cancer data so the overall risk appears low.
Egilman, who consults for asbestos plaintiffs, spends much of his time rebutting Paustenbach and other industry-funded researchers. “They can throw a lot of things at the wall and hope something sticks with the jury,” he said. “It forces people like me or other scientists to try to clean up each thing that was thrown at the wall, one at a time. And by the end of the day, that could be confusing to a jury or judge.”
Egilman said the body of work underwritten by Ford and other asbestos defendants is being used to try to deprive sick workers, or their families, of compensation. “Some courts have adopted it as a standard,” he said.
More broadly, the industry-funded papers can confuse the public – and even government experts.
In 2009, the National Cancer Institute published a fact sheet on its website stating there was no evidence brake work was associated with an increased risk of mesothelioma or lung cancer. The 2004 meta-analysis funded by the automakers was cited as a reference.
Dr. Arthur Frank, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Drexel University, was incredulous.
“What is truly ironic about such a statement is that it is incontrovertible that asbestos, including chrysotile, the type of asbestos found in brakes, does, in fact, cause lung cancer and mesothelioma,” Frank wrote in a letter to the institute’s director obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Since we have not banned asbestos in this country, those who might read this statement could well think asbestos brakes are safe, putting at risk both professional and ‘shade tree’ mechanics, and their family members.”
Frank said the meta-analysis cited by the institute was “unreliable and should not serve as the basis for any statement by the NCI.”
Then-NCI Director Dr. John Neiderhuber replied that he had discussed Frank’s critique with an in-house expert who agreed that the language on the website should be amended. The new statement, posted less than two weeks after Frank sent his letter, read that while studies of cancer risks among auto mechanics were limited, “the overall evidence suggests that there is no safe level for asbestos exposure.” The citation of the 2004 paper was deleted.
The brake studies have had global reach. The “chrysotile-is-safe” argument has been used to stave off asbestos bans and preserve markets in developing nations such as India and China, where building materials and other products containing asbestos are widely used.
“The real nefarious part of this research … is that a lot of people who live in those countries are continuing to be exposed under uncontrolled conditions to asbestos,” Egilman said. “That’s the real horror story here.”
Ronnie Stockton’s auto repair shop in Jackson, Tenn. (Courtesy of the Stockton family)
Ronnie and Joyce Stockton. Courtesy of the Stockton family
A Ford loss in Tennessee
While the brake papers and the experts who write them have contributed to defense verdicts in mesothelioma cases, things occasionally go the other way.
Ronnie Stockton operated an auto repair shop 100 feet from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, for 30 years and specialized in brake jobs, often on Ford vehicles. He’d attended training classes in which instructors recommended that paper masks be worn around brake dust but never heard a “full description of what asbestos did,” he said in a recent interview. “We wasn’t warned it could kill you when you swept it up and didn’t wear the mask.”
As it turned out, Stockton’s wife, Joyce, was the one who got sick. She used to help her husband sweep out the shop. She kept the books and washed Ronnie’s dusty clothes. One night in December 2010 she lay down in bed and felt her chest tighten. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” she said. A biopsy confirmed that she had mesothelioma, to that point merely a strange word she’d heard in lawyers’ TV commercials. “I would sit in front of the television trying to learn how to pronounce it, not ever knowing I had the disease,” she said.
The Stocktons sued Ford and went to trial in August. Two Exponent scientists were among the defense experts.
In his closing argument after nearly two weeks of testimony, Ruckdeschel, the Stocktons’ lawyer, said Ford’s experts had “spun the literature” on asbestos. “They’re not taking what the studies say; they’re putting a spin on it.”
If independent research had shown no connection between brake work and mesothelioma, Ruckdeschel said, “they wouldn’t have had to go and pay Exponent to write all the papers to say, ‘Well, we’ve reanalyzed the data, and there really isn’t any evidence.’ ”
Defense lawyer Samuel Tarry urged jurors not to be swayed by the millions of dollars Ford had invested in the papers. It “shouldn’t come as any surprise that over time it costs a lot of money to defend these cases and to publish research where it can be critiqued and criticized and start discussions,” he said. Tarry recounted the testimony of Exponent’s Mark Roberts, who “told you that the majority of mesotheliomas in women are unrelated to asbestos. … He explained that all of us have a background risk, not just for mesothelioma but for any type of cancer …. They can happen naturally. They can happen with an environmental insult.”
After deliberating about two days, the jury returned a $4.65 million verdict in the Stocktons’ favor. It assigned 71 percent of the liability to Ford and 29 percent to brake manufacturer Honeywell, which had been brought into the case on Ford’s motion. Ford has asked for a new trial.
Latisha Strickland was the jury foreman. She’d wanted to assign 100 percent of the blame to Ford but agreed to the 71-29 split to avoid a hung jury.
“I felt ashamed — I had compromised what I thought it should be,” Strickland, a home-school teacher, said in a telephone interview. “You couldn’t give me the Powerball lottery to go through the amount of surgeries this woman [Joyce Stockton] has gone through.”
Strickland said she was especially put off by the 1971 memo showing Ford decided not to spend $1.25 per vehicle to replace front-end asbestos brakes.
Really, this is what we already learned from our grandmothers who lived by ‘waste not want not’. I always smile when I see these ‘revolutionary’ ideas that are really recycled ideas our forbears practiced centuries ago. Recycled now as ‘sustainable’ which also happens to be the globalists’ catch word… a good reminder nevertheless, all that aside … to waste not and want not. Especially right now that the said globalists are paying farmers to plow under their crops. EWR
From foodrevolutionnetwork.org
Summary
There’s a new environmental trend in the food industry, with a funny name: upcycling. Basically, it means taking ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown out, and turning them into or using them in new food products. But are upcycled foods safe? Are they healthy? Can you actually make good food out of those scraps and byproducts? And can it really help save the planet?
Have you ever made bread crumbs out of stale bread, and used them for stuffing? If so, congratulations: You’re an upcycler! Ditto if you’ve turned overripe bananas into banana bread, or vegetable scraps into soup stock.
Your stuffing, banana bread, and soup may have been delicious, but did you also pat yourself on the back for being environmentally conscious and helping fight climate change? By keeping those items in your food supply, you didn’t have to buy more, and you kept them out of landfills.
While many environmental organizations focus on transportation and energy consumption as the main contributors to climate change, the US food system is actually one of the most significant drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. So anything you can do to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet (like eating less or no meat) is a win for the planet.
Upcycling can be simple if you’re doing it in your own kitchen, but it’s also happening at scale, in more and more industrial food settings. Many companies are releasing upcycled food products carrying environmental claims to address growing consumer concerns about planetary health. But upcycling is a fairly new term when applied to food, first gaining popularity in 2021, in the wake of increased concern for the planet that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
So if you see an upcycled certification on a food item, does that mean you should buy it? Is upcycled food good for you or the planet, or just corporate greenwashing? And what are some ways to increase upcycling within your own home economics?
What Does Upcycled Food Mean?
Let’s start by defining the term. Upcycling basically means finding new, higher-value uses for items that would otherwise go to waste. It is distinct from recycling, which is when something is broken down into base materials and then turned into new products (like aluminum cans that are melted and go on to become new aluminum cans, or plastic bottles that become fleece fabric).
Examples of ingredients that can be upcycled include sub-grade produce (i.e., bruised apples, carrots that look like horror movie monsters, and misshapen tomatoes); scraps from food preparation (like onion skins and potato peels); and byproducts from food processing.
The first two categories are pretty straightforward. A tomato that’s too ugly to sell in a grocery store can still taste delicious in a sauce or on a frozen pizza. The Ugly Company turns misshapen fruit into “Hello, I’m Ugly” dried fruit snacks. And discarded scraps can be used as-is in formulations for soup and sauces. But what about byproducts? What do they consist of?
Think of food products that contain ingredients that come from plants — but aren’t the whole plant. For example, fruit juice comes from fruit but leaves behind fiber. Tofu is made from soybeans but consists of just curds. If you’ve ever made tofu at home, you’ve had to deal with (toss or repurpose) the remaining fiber-rich pulp, also known as okara.
So what happens to the parts of those raw ingredients that don’t make it into the product that ends up on the supermarket shelf? At worst, they become garbage in a landfill. At best, until recently, maybe they became compost for farms, ingredients for industrial processes, or feed for livestock.
But these remnants of food production can also live again as ingredients in upcycled foods. The pulp that remains when juice is pressed can add fiber to other foods. The okara left over from making tofu can be turned into veggie patties and other types of faux meat. Upcycling these byproducts can be a way to reduce food waste and help fight climate change by keeping food out of landfills.
Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
Two of the most harmful ingredients in processed foods are high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil, whether partially hydrogenated, organic, or made from newer soybean varieties modified in such a way as to not require hydrogenation
Completely unnatural man-made fats created through the partial hydrogenation process cause dysfunction and chaos in your body on a cellular level, and studies have linked trans-fats to health problems ranging from obesity and diabetes to reproductive problems and heart disease
Besides the health hazards related to the trans fats created by the partial hydrogenation process, soybean oil is, in and of itself, NOT a healthy oil
Add to that the fact that the majority of soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically engineered, and as a result saturated with dangerous levels of the herbicide glyphosate, which may have additional health consequences as there are no long term safety studies
When taken together, partially hydrogenated GE soybean oil becomes one of the absolute worst types of oils you can consume
The genetically engineered (GE) variety planted on over 90% of U.S. soy acres is Roundup Ready engineered to survive being doused with otherwise lethal amounts of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (glyphosate). GE soybeans have been found to contain residue levels as high as 17 mg/kg, and malformations in frog and chicken embryos have occurred at just over 2 mg/kg
Processed food is perhaps the most damaging aspect of most people’s diets, contributing to poor health and chronic disease. One of the primary culprits is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the dangers of which I touch on in virtually every article I write on diets. The second culprit is partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
These two ingredients, either alone or in combination, can be found in virtually all processed foods, and one can make a compelling argument that the reliance on these two foods is a primary contributing factor for most of the degenerative diseases attacking Americans today.
Part of the problem with partially hydrogenated soybean oil is the trans fat it contains. The other part relates to the health hazards of soy itself. An added hazard factor is the fact that the majority of both corn and soybeans are genetically engineered.
As the negative health effects from trans fats have been identified and recognized, the agricultural and food industry have scrambled to come up with new alternatives. Partially hydrogenated soybean oil has been identified as the main culprit, and for good reason.
Unfortunately, saturated fats are still mistakenly considered unhealthy by many health “experts,” so, rather than embracing truly healthful tropical fats like coconut oil, which is mostly grown outside the U.S., the food industry has instead turned to domestic U.S. alternatives offered by companies like Monsanto, now Bayer (which bought out Monsanto in 2018), which has developed modified soybeans that don’t require hydrogenation.
Why Hydrogenate?
Americans consume more than 16 million metric tons of edible oils annually, and soybean oil accounts for about 11,339 metric tons of it.1 Until Monsanto genetically engineered its seeds to produce plants lower in linolenic acid, about half of it was hydrogenated, as regular soybean oil is too unstable otherwise to be used in food manufacturing.
One of the primary reasons for hydrogenating oil is to prolong its shelf life. Raw butter, for example, is likely to go rancid far quicker than margarine. The process also makes the oil more stable and raises its melting point, which allows it to be used in various types of food processing that uses high temperatures.
Hydrogenated oil2 is made by forcing hydrogen gas into the oil at high pressure. Virtually any oil can be hydrogenated. Margarine is a good example, in which nearly half of the fat content is trans fat.
The process that creates partially hydrogenated oil alters the chemical composition of essential fatty acids, such as reducing or removing linolenic acid, a highly reactive triunsaturated fatty acid, transforming it into the far less reactive linoleic acid, thereby greatly preventing oxidative rancidity when used in cooking.
In the late 1990s, researchers began realizing this chemical alteration might actually have adverse health effects. Since then, scientists have verified this to the point of no dispute.
Be aware that there’s a difference between “fully hydrogenated” and “partially hydrogenated” oils. Whereas partially hydrogenated oil contains trans fat, fully hydrogenated oil does not, as taking the hydrogenation process “all the way” continues the molecular transformation of the fatty acids from trans fat into saturated fatty acids.
Fully hydrogenated soybean oil is still not a healthy choice, however, for reasons I’ll explain below. The following slide presentation explains the technical aspects relating to the hydrogenation process.
The Health Hazards of Trans Fats
The completely unnatural man-made fats created through the partial hydrogenation process cause dysfunction and chaos in your body on a cellular level, and studies have linked trans-fats to:
Cancer, by interfering with enzymes your body uses to fight cancer
Chronic health problems such as obesity, asthma, auto-immune disease, cancer and bone degeneration
Diabetes, by interfering with the insulin receptors in your cell membranes
Heart disease, by clogging your arteries (Among women with underlying coronary heart disease, eating trans-fats increased the risk of sudden cardiac arrest three-fold!)
Decreased immune function, by reducing your immune response
Increased blood levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol, while lowering levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good” cholesterol
Reproductive problems by interfering with enzymes needed to produce sex hormones
Interfering with your body’s use of beneficial omega-3 fats
As usual, it took many years before conventional health recommendations caught up and began warning about the use of trans fats. Not surprisingly, as soon as the FDA notified them that it planned to require food manufacturers to list trans fat content on the label — which ultimately took effect January 1, 2006 — the industry began searching for viable alternatives to appeal to consumers who increasingly began looking for the “no trans fat” designation.
It didn’t take long before Monsanto had tinkered forth a genetically engineered soybean that is low in linolenic acid, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Be aware that some food manufacturers have opted to simply fool buyers — a tactic allowed by the FDA, as any product containing up to half a gram of trans fat per serving can still legally claim to have zero trans fat.3 The trick is to reduce the serving size to bring it below this threshold. At times, this will result in unreasonably tiny serving sizes, so any time you check a label and a serving is something like 10 chips or one cookie, it probably contains trans fats.
The Health Hazards of Soybeans
Besides the health hazards related to the trans fats created by the partial hydrogenation process, soybean oil is, in and of itself, NOT a healthy oil. Add to that the fact that the majority of soy grown in the U.S. is genetically engineered, which may have additional health consequences. When taken together, partially hydrogenated GE soybean oil becomes one of the absolute worst types of oils you can consume.
Years ago, tropical oils, such as palm and coconut oil, were commonly used in American food production. However, these are obviously not grown in the U.S., as with the exception of Hawaii, our climate isn’t tropical enough. Spurred by financial incentives, the industry devised a plan to shift the market from tropical oils to something more “home grown.”
As a result, a movement was created to demonize and vilify tropical oils in order to replace them with domestically grown oils such as corn and soy.
The fat in soybean oil is primarily omega-6 fat. And while we do need some omega-6, it is rare for anyone to be deficient in it, as it is pervasive in our diet. Americans in general consume FAR too much omega-6 in relation to omega-3 fat, primarily due to the excessive amount of omega-6 found in processed foods.
Omega-6 fats are in nearly every animal food and many plants, so deficiencies are very rare. This omega-6 fat is also highly processed and therefore damaged, which compounds the problem of getting so much of it in your diet. The omega-6 found in soybean oil promotes chronic inflammation in your body, which is an underlying issue for virtually all chronic diseases.
What About Organic Soybean Oil?
Even if you were fortunate enough to find organic soybean oil, there are still several significant concerns that make it far from attractive from a health standpoint. Soy in and of itself, organically grown or not, contains a number of problematic components that can wreak havoc with your health, such as:
• Goitrogens — Goitrogens, found in all unfermented soy whether it’s organic or not, are substances that block the synthesis of thyroid hormones and interfere with iodine metabolism, thereby interfering with your thyroid function.
• Isoflavones: genistein and daidzein — Isoflavones are a type of phytoestrogen, which is a plant compound resembling human estrogen, which is why some recommend using soy therapeutically to treat symptoms of menopause. I believe the evidence is highly controversial and doubt it works.
Typically, most of us are exposed to too many estrogen compounds and have a lower testosterone level than ideal, so it really is important to limit exposure to feminizing phytoestrogens. Even more importantly, there’s evidence it may disturb endocrine function, cause infertility and promote breast cancer, which is definitely a significant concern.
• Phytic acid — Phytates (phytic acid) bind to metal ions, preventing the absorption of certain minerals, including calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc — all of which are co-factors for optimal biochemistry in your body. This is particularly problematic for vegetarians, because eating meat reduces the mineral-blocking effects of these phytates.
Sometimes it can be beneficial, especially in postmenopausal women and in most adult men because we tend to have levels of iron that are too high, which can be a very potent oxidant and cause biological stress. However, phytic acid does not necessarily selectively inhibit just iron absorption; it inhibits all minerals. This is very important to remember, as many already suffer from mineral deficiencies from inadequate diets.
The soybean has one of the highest phytate levels of any grain or legume, and the phytates in soy are highly resistant to normal phytate-reducing techniques such as long, slow cooking. Only a long period of fermentation will significantly reduce the phytate content of soybeans.
• Natural toxins known as “anti-nutrients” — Soy also contains other anti-nutritional factors such as saponins, soyatoxin, protease inhibitors, and oxalates. Some of these factors interfere with the enzymes you need to digest protein. While a small amount of anti-nutrients would not likely cause a problem, the amount of soy that many Americans are now eating is extremely high.
• Hemagglutinin — Hemagglutinin is a clot-promoting substance that causes your red blood cells to clump together. These clumped cells are unable to properly absorb and distribute oxygen to your tissues.
Worst of All — Genetically Engineered Soybean Oil
The genetically engineered (GE) variety planted on over 90% of US soy acres is Roundup Ready — engineered to survive being doused with otherwise lethal amounts of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The logic behind Roundup Ready crops such as soy is that you can decrease the cost of production by killing off everything except the actual soy plant.
However, animal studies reveal there may be significant adverse health effects from these GE soybeans, including progressively increased rates of infertility with each passing generation. By the third generation, virtually all the hamsters in one feeding study were found to be infertile. Second-generation hamsters raised on GE soy also had a fivefold higher infant mortality rate.
Are Low-Linolenic Soybeans the Answer?
We now also have other Monsanto-made soy crops to contend with. Responding to the growing demand for healthier diets, Monsanto launched Vistive low-linolenic soybeans in 2005. Most soybeans contain roughly 7% linolenic acid. The new varieties contain 1% to 3%, which reduces the need for hydrogenation.4 As explained by Monsanto:5
“Farmers are not the only beneficiaries of Monsanto’s efforts … Consumers will also benefit from the healthier crops that could result, such as soybeans that are low in linolenic acid. Linolenic acid, a precursor to trans fats, may contribute to cardiovascular disease … Low-linolenic soybeans reduce the need for hydrogenation in food processing, helping to reduce the amount of trans fats in processed foods.”
Yet another soybean variety created by Monsanto is the high stearate soybean, which also has the properties of margarine and shortening without hydrogenation. But are these soybeans any better or safer than either conventional soybeans or Roundup Ready soybeans, even though they don’t have to go through partial hydrogenation, and therefore do not contain trans fat? No one knows.
Another Hazard of GE Soybeans: Glyphosate
I keep stacking health risks upon health risks, and here’s another one: Research has shown that soybean oil from Roundup Ready soy is loaded with glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup — the broad-spectrum herbicide created by Monsanto.
According to a report in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, the highest MRL for glyphosate in food and feed products in the EU is 20 mg/kg. GE soybeans have been found to contain residue levels as high as 17 mg/kg, and malformations in frog and chicken embryos occurred at 2.03 mg/kg.6 That’s 10 times lower than the MRL.
This is an alarming finding because glyphosate is easily one of the world’s most overlooked poisons. Research published in 2010 showed that the chemical, which works by inhibiting an enzyme called EPSP synthase that is necessary for plants to grow, causes birth defects in frogs and chicken embryos at far lower levels than used in agricultural and garden applications.7 The malformations primarily affected the:
Skull
Face
Midline and developing brain
Spinal cord
When applied to crops, glyphosate becomes systemic throughout the plant, so it cannot be washed off. And, once you eat this crop, the glyphosate ends up in your gut where it can decimate your beneficial bacteria. This can wreak havoc with your health, as 80% of your immune system resides in your gut (GALT, or Gut Associated Lymph Tissue) and is dependent on a healthy ratio of good and bad bacteria. Separate research has also uncovered the following effects from glyphosate:
Endocrine disruption
DNA damage
Developmental toxicity
Neurotoxicity
Reproductive toxicity
Cancer
To Avoid Harmful Fats, Ditch Processed Foods
If you want to avoid dangerous fats of all kinds, your best bet is to eliminate processed foods from your diet. From there, use these tips to make sure you’re eating the right fats for your health:
Use organic butter (preferably made from raw milk) instead of margarines and vegetable oil spreads. Butter is a healthy whole food that has received an unwarranted bad rap.
Use coconut oil for cooking. It is far superior to any other cooking oil and is loaded with health benefits.
Be sure to eat raw fats, such as those from avocados, raw dairy products, olive oil, olives, organic pastured eggs and raw nuts, especially macadamia nuts which are relatively low in protein. Also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.
Following my comprehensive nutrition plan will automatically reduce your trans-fat intake, as it will give you a guide to focus on healthy whole foods instead of processed junk food.
Remember, virtually all processed foods will contain either HFCS (probably made from genetically engineered corn) and/or soybean oil — either in the form of partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is likely made from GE soybeans, loaded with glyphosate, or from one of the newer soybean varieties that were created such that the y do not need to be hydrogenated. They’re ALL bad news, if you value your health.
( See at end of article for New Year Sale Details…)
Wishing you a Happy New Year Gardening.
Now the weather has settled a bit and temperatures are better (But still a bit chilly at times) Insect pests will multiply rapidly unless you instigate early controls.
If you look at when you are successful in eliminating one adult female insect, that will prevent somewhere between 100 to 300 more of the same pests to invest your plants.
For instance using the yellow sticky white fly traps; hang one near your tomato plants and within a few days the number of whitefly and other flying pest insects caught on the trap’s sticky surface will be dozens.
The sticky traps are worth their weight in gold for pest control.
Plants such as tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, egg plants, capsicum and courgettes will likely have under the older leaves a lot of young pests.
Inspect the oldest leaves looking over and under and if there are a good number of pests remove the leaves from the plant and place in a plastic bag and seal.
This will greatly reduce the pest problem.
There will likely be pests on the upper/newer leaves but a spray of Wallys Super Neem Tree Oil with Wallys Super Pyrethrum will take care of these.
These combined sprays should only be applied only just before dusk for two reasons, Neem Oil in sunlight or with UV on a cloudy day can burn foliage.
Pyrethrum is quickly deactivated by UV/Sunlight and when expose to than will be ineffective within a couple of hours.
Pyrethrum sprayed just before dark will be active all night affecting any pests that come in contact with it. Pyrethrum is a quick knock down affecting the insects nervous system and thus killing it.
Neem Oil on the other hand will last for up to 7 days, slowly decreasing the effectiveness due to sunlight.
Its action is anti-feedent and once a pest insect consumes some Neem it stops eating for ever.
Adding Raingard to the above sprays will prolong the effective life of them and prevent the sprays been diluted by rain or watering.
For control of guava moth and codlin moth the most effective way is to spray the fruit with Wallys Super Neem Tree Oil with Raingard added.
This puts a layer of Neem Oil over the fruit so that when one of the moth’s grubs tries to eat their way into the fruit they are stopped at the first bite. Repeat spraying the fruit with Neem oil and Raingard added every 14 days till harvest.
Leaf hoppers, aphids, caterpillars and mealy bugs are simply controlled with the spray above applied late in the day.
One of the problems is re-infestation from other plants nearby or from over the fence.
Unless the other plants nearby are also sprayed you will never win.
Spider Mites are best controlled by sprays of sulphur or as we used to do in days gone by, Sulphur powder dusted over the plants that have mites.
At this time of the year you may have the cherry slug or pear slug eating holes in the leaves of those trees. If so spray the foliage with Wallys Liquid Copper with Raingard added. The pests cant handle copper and drop off and die.
Mealy bugs live in the root system of plants and the adults are found in the canopy. Spraying the canopy will take them out but not affect the ones in the root system.
Apply Wallys Neem Tree Powder to the top of the mix in containers that are affected and Wallys Neem Tree Granules to the soil in the root zone of plants affected.
Pest problems on citrus trees are very easily fixed by sprinkling Wallys Neem Tree Granules from the trunk to the drip line. Lightly water to get them started and normally within 6 to 8 weeks the citrus tree will be free of pests.
The smell of Neem granules/power is also a great deterrent as the Neem smell camouflages the natural smell of the plant and pests looking for their host plant by smell cannot find them and fly on by.
In glasshouses Wallys Neem Granules on the soil or on top of the mix in containers will reduce insects pests from been lured in from the smell of their host plants.
Little pouches made out of curtain netting and loaded with Neem Granules before hanging in fruit trees that are subjected to codlin and guava moth attack. Used in conjunction with the Neem Oil sprays on the fruit should mean you have plenty of unaffected fruit for your use.
Cats can be a pest in gardens as they use them for their toilets and Wallys Cat Repellent is the most effective way to prevent them fouling gardens or other areas.
Crop cover also called Bug Mesh is the best control of keeping white butterflies off your cabbages and brassicas. Hoops made out of rigid alkathene pipe with crop cover over them.
Weeds are another garden pest and a safe to use spray is Wallys Super Compost Accelerator which you can use to compost weeds where they are growing.
A few years ago a chap from UK phoned me and asked about getting ammonium sulphamate in NZ.
I had not heard of it and asked whats it for.
He told me in England you purchased it, dissolved it in water and sprayed it onto weeds to compost them where they are growing. The weeds think its nitrogen and readily take it in where it completely composts the living weeds and then coverts to nitrogen so no harm on soil life or yourself.
The most effective rate is 200 grams per litre of water sprayed on a sunny day when the soil is on the dry side. Given ideal conditions the weeds are composted very quickly in some cases with an hour.
Available as Wallys Super Compost Accelerator in 600 gram jar (makes 3 litres of full strength spray) or in 2kg jar named Ammonium sulphamate making 10 litres full strength spray.
If used at say 100 grams per litre of water the composting takes longer but on most weeds still very effective. A good choice to use instead of possible cancer causing chemicals.
One of the interesting aspects of the composting is if watered over oxalis foliage and into the soil where the bulb is, it will compost the bulb and bulblets in the soil. Repeat when new oxalis foliage appears till the area is free of the pest weed.
When used at rates of say 60 to 80 grams per litre of water it does not affect some strains of grass but can compost some broad leaf weeds in lawns. Experiment as to what rate it composts weeds but not affect you lawn grasses.
Unlike herbicide lawn weed killers that you cant compost the lawn clipping because of the reside in the cut grass that would effect herbicide sensitive plants (roses, Tomatoes, Beans) there is no problem with ammonium sulphamate composting the clippings which will only speed up the composting.
Wishing you a pest free New Year.
To help to make it so we are offering you a special discount of 20% off the following pest control items:
All Neem Products (Neem Oil, Neem Granules and Powder all sizes) 20% off
Wallys Super Pyrethrum 20% off
Wallys White Fly sticky Traps 20% off
Wallys Super Compost Accelerator 600 grams 20% off
Wallys Ammonium Sulphamate 2kilos 20% off
Wallys Cat Repellent 200 grams 20% off
All the rest of our products except bulk ones 10% off
Place orders on our mail order web site at www.0800466464.co.nz and place in comments ‘PEST SALE’ so I know to do the discounts when I will phone you.
I will apply discounts and Shipping (if any) before I phone you with the total.
Then we either do Credit/Debit card over phone or I will email you bank transfer details.
If in North Island and order comes to $100 after discounts then free shipping.
In South Island $150.00 after discounts for free shipping.
The total does not include bulk items such as 12kilo BioPhos, 13kg Ocean solids and 10 kg Unlocking soil (Freight is always charged on bulk products)
The above offer is valid till 31st January…
The first 25 orders into the web site will receive a free autographed copy of Wallys Glasshouse Gardening for New Zealand. Make your summer free of pests and order soon.
Regards and Happy New Year
Wally Richards
Problems ring me at 0800 466464 Email wallyjr@gardenews.co.nz Web site www.gardenews.co.nz
New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Part II of the Act covers a broad range of Civil and Political Rights. As part of the right to life and the security of the person, the Act guarantees everyone:
1The right not to be deprived of life except in accordance with fundamental justice (Section 8)
2The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading, or disproportionately severe treatment or punishment (Section 9)
3The right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without consent (Section 10)
4The right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment (Section 11)
Furthermore, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 guarantees everyone: Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion. This includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO ADOPT AND HOLD OPINIONS WITHOUT INTERFERENCE (Section 1)
Potatoes contain vitamins, minerals, starch ….. eating potatoes fight cancer, increase glucose loading capacity, reduce plasma cholesterol and triglyceride levels… Porous and dry soil helps potatoes grow well. Using old plastic paint buckets to grow potatoes is a great idea, it’s easy to make and saves money. You use 2 old plastic paint buckets, 1 of which you cut holes around 4 sides to later harvest potatoes, then punch holes for drainage. Next, you stack the old paint bucket that has been cut on the remaining one. It is better to plant the potatoes in the sand so that they germinate and then plant them in an old paint bucket After 3-4 months you can already harvest the first batch of potatoes and have a delicious and nutritious meal from the potatoes. Follow us: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/5T1TV Twitter: https://twitter.com/namtrinhhau Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ideas2034/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_ideas_…
Brown University researchers conducted a study to determine which micronutrients are best for your heart
They unveiled an up-to-date evidence-based map that quantifies the impact of micronutrients on cardiovascular outcomes
Out of 27 micronutrients, three — omega-3 fats, folate and coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) — came out on top
Omega-3 fats decreased mortality from cardiovascular disease, while also reducing heart attacks and coronary heart disease events
Folic acid, the synthetic version of folate, or vitamin B9, reduced stroke risk, while CoQ10 decreased all-cause mortality events
Most, but not all, of the micronutrients studied showed “moderate- to high-quality evidence” of reducing risk factors for cardiovascular disease
Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., killing one person every 34 seconds.1 Your diet plays a prominent role in your heart health, but the role of individual micronutrients continues to be debated. Brown University researchers conducted a study to determine which micronutrients are best for your heart.2
They unveiled an up-to-date evidence-based map that quantifies the impact of micronutrients on cardiovascular outcomes. Out of 27 micronutrients, three — omega-3 fats, folate and coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) — came out on top.
Micronutrients Benefit Cardiometabolic Health
Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals that your body needs to function optimally. Deficiencies in micronutrients can lead to a range of acute and chronic conditions. In terms of heart health, Brown University researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis involving 884 trials. The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, evaluated 27 types of micronutrients used by 883,627 participants.3
“For the first time, we developed a comprehensive, evidence-based integrative map to characterize and quantify micronutrient supplements’ potential effects on cardiometabolic outcomes,” study author Dr. Simin Liu, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Brown University, said in a news release. “Our study highlights the importance of micronutrient diversity and the balance of health benefits and risks.”4
Most, but not all, of the micronutrients showed “moderate- to high-quality evidence” of reducing risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Those that were beneficial included:5
Folic acid (folate)
Vitamin D
Magnesium
Zinc
Alpha-lipoic acid
Coenzyme Q10
Melatonin
Catechin
Curcumin
Flavanol
Genistein
Quercetin
The study was unique in that it took a comprehensive look at micronutrient supplementation, including phytochemicals and antioxidants. Liu explained:6
“Research on micronutrient supplementation has mainly focused on the health effects of a single or a few vitamins and minerals. We decided to take a comprehensive and systematic approach to evaluate all the publicly available and accessible studies reporting all micronutrients, including phytochemicals and antioxidant supplements and their effects on cardiovascular risk factors as well as multiple cardiovascular diseases.”
3 Micronutrients to Support Heart Health
While beta carotene supplementation increased all-cause mortality, omega-3 fats, folate and CoQ10 were highly protective. Here are more details about how these important micronutrients affect your heart health.
1. Omega-3s — The study found omega-3 fats decreased mortality from cardiovascular disease, while also reducing heart attacks and coronary heart disease events.7 This mirrors previous studies, which have also found beneficial effects of omega-3s on heart health. Omega-3 fats derived from krill oil, for instance, have been found to reduce triglyceride levels and help reduce cardiovascular risk.8
Further, people with Type 2 diabetes who used omega-3 supplements had a lower incidence of hospitalization with heart failure — a form of heart disease in which the heart experiences ventricular dysfunction — in another study.9
An omega-3 index test is one of the most important annual health screens that everyone needs, and it’s a more important predictor of your heart disease risk than your cholesterol levels. Even research supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests an omega-3 test is a good predictor of overall health and all-cause mortality.10,11
That study measured the omega-3 index in 2,500 participants and found those with the highest omega-3 index had lower risks of heart problems and lower total mortality. The omega-3 index measures of the amount of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in the membranes of your red blood cells (RBC). Your index is expressed as a percent of your total RBC fatty acids.
The omega-3 index has been validated as a stable, long-term marker of your omega-3 status, and it reflects your tissue levels of EPA and DHA. An omega-3 index over 8% is associated with the lowest risk of death from heart disease, while an index below 4% places you at the highest risk of heart disease-related mortality.
The ideal sources for EPA and DHA include cold-water fatty fish, like wild-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, herring and anchovies. If you do not eat these fish on a regular basis, consider taking a krill oil supplement.
In addition, be aware that your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio should be about 1-to-1 or possibly up to 4-to-1, but most Americans consume far too many omega-6 fats and not enough omega-3. For optimal heart health, in addition to increasing your omega-3, it’s important to cut down on industrially processed seeds oils, often referred to as “vegetable oils,” found in most processed foods.
2. Folate — The Journal of the American College of Cardiology study revealed that folic acid reduced stroke risk.12 Folic acid is the synthetic version of folate, or vitamin B9, and it’s the most important dietary determinant of homocysteine. Elevated levels of homocysteine (Hcy) are a risk factor for coronary artery disease and are found in most patients with vascular disease.13 According to a literature review published in Advances in Therapy:14
“Several mechanisms have been proposed for Hcy’s pathogenesis related to vascular disease. Hcy can cause endothelial injury, dysfunction of DNA, proliferation of smooth muscle cells, oxidative stress, decreased function of glutathione peroxidase, impaired nitric oxide synthase, and inflammation.”
Evidence suggests that daily folic acid supplementation lowers homocysteine levels. “In fact, it has been shown that folic acid supplementation of 0.5 to 5.0 mg can lower Hcy levels by 25% and, thus, may decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease … Given that folic acid is cheap and effective, this should be a viable option for patients with high-risk for cardiovascular adverse events,” the researchers explained.15
In an animal study, folic acid was also found to prevent age-related structure changes and dysfunction of the heart that may lead to heart failure.16 It reduced cellular senescence, a hallmark of aging. The best way to increase your levels of this important micronutrient is to eat foods rich in natural folate, such as asparagus, avocados, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and spinach.
3. CoQ10 — CoQ10 decreased all-cause mortality events, according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology study.17 Ubiquinol — the reduced, electron-rich form of CoQ10 that your body produces naturally — plays an important role in the electron transport chain of your mitochondria, where it facilitates the conversion of energy substrates and oxygen into the biological energy (adenosine triphosphate, or ATP) needed by your cells for life, repair and regeneration.
It’s a fat-soluble antioxidant, meaning it works in the fat portions of your body, such as your cell membranes, where it mops up potentially harmful byproducts of metabolism known as reactive oxygen species (ROS). As such, ubiquinol and CoQ10 supplements help protect your mitochondrial membranes from oxidative damage.
Many conditions, including heart disease, appear to be rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction.18 CoQ10 is used by every cell in your body, but especially your heart cells. Cardiac muscle cells have about 5,000 mitochondria per cell.19 For further comparison, mitochondria make up about 35% of the volume of cardiac tissue and only 3% to 8% of the volume of skeletal muscle tissue.20
In other research, CoQ10 has been found to help improve atrial fibrillation (AFib).21 AFib is an abnormal, often rapid, heart rhythm that occurs when the atria, your heart’s upper chambers, beat out of sync with the ventricles, the heart’s lower chambers. It’s a common symptom in those with heart failure or heart disease. In addition, CoQ10 influences several other aspects of heart health, including:
High blood pressure — CoQ10 acts directly on your endothelium, dilating your blood vessels and lowering blood pressure.22,23 CoQ10 also decreases aldosterone, a hormone that makes you retain salt and water.24,25 When aldosterone goes down, excess salt and water are excreted through your kidneys, often causing your blood pressure to go down.
Systemic inflammation — Supplementing with 60 milligrams (mg) to 500 mg of CoQ10 for eight to 12 weeks can significantly reduce tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), IL-6 and C-reactive protein (CRP);26,27 three measures of widespread inflammation.
Stroke — Systemic inflammation, oxidative stress and nerve cell damage play a role in the development of stroke. Research suggests supplementing with CoQ10 can reduce ischemic lesions and improve outcomes in patients who have been treated with a statin drug after having a stroke (statins reduce CoQ10 levels in your body).28
Your body can naturally make CoQ10, but genetic alterations in metabolism, poor diet, oxidative stress, chronic conditions and aging can all interfere with CoQ10 production and lead to CoQ10 deficiency. Statin drugs can also deplete CoQ10.
Ubiquinol production ramps up from early childhood until your mid- to late 20s. By the time you hit 30, it begins to decline.29 Young people are able to use CoQ10 supplements quite well, but older people do better with ubiquinol, as it’s more readily absorbed.
A Personalized Approach Is Best
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to supporting your heart health. Indeed, the featured study researchers noted that “an optimal nutritional strategy to promote cardiometabolic health will likely involve personalized combinations of these nutrients.”30
However, healthy diet, exercise, stress reduction and heart-based connections — i.e., strong and positive relationships — are key to heart and overall health. As mentioned, I also believe an omega-3 index test is one of the most important annual health screenings you can receive.
GrassrootsHealth makes testing easy through its D*Action+Omega-3 consumer-sponsored research project.31 You can find the GrassrootsHealth omega-3 index test kit on the GrassrootsHealth website.32
Note: Due to censorship of Dr Mercola’s articles he archives them to paid sub soon after publishing. I’ve therefore published this in its entirety however you may find the source link will no longer work. EWR
Story at-a-glance
Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) cause massive mitochondrial dysfunction, thus raising the risk for, and worsening, chronic and degenerative diseases
A perfect storm of DNA and cellular protein and membrane destruction is created when you aren’t burning fat for fuel (which creates excess superoxide) and then get exposed to EMFs
By creating doubt and controversy, the wireless industry effectively prevents the public from knowing the truth and demanding safer products. Another wireless industry strategy that prevents the problem from becoming public knowledge is the capturing of our federal regulatory agencies
Elon Musk’s Starlink project, which was slated to deploy up to 42,000 satellites into orbit around the earth, will blanket the entire planet with 5G internet frequencies. You won’t be able to escape it
Based on the studies already done on previous generations of wireless, we know it’s harmful, and 5G is only going to make matters worse, as it will dramatically increase our exposures
I was recently interviewed by Siim Land about my new book, “EMF*D,” described by Siim as “the most comprehensive guide … to everything you need to know about EMF.”
In it, I explain what electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are, the different types of EMFs you’re exposed to, the harms associated with exposure, the concerns surrounding 5G and, ultimately, how to protect yourself and limit your exposure.
As I explain in the interview, the thing that catalyzed me to write “EMF*D” was my deep appreciation of the impact of mitochondrial function in health and disease. Once I realized how EMFs impact mitochondrial function — because it’s very clear that EMF causes massive mitochondrial dysfunction — the danger our wireless society poses became very clear to me.
I also read a study1 stressing the importance of mitochondrial numbers for improving senescent cells — cells that are, in a manner of speaking, “senile” and have stopped reproducing properly. Instead, senescent cells produce inflammation, contributing to old age and, ultimately, death.
The fewer mitochondria you have, and the more dysfunctional they are, the faster you’ll age and the more prone you’ll be to chronic degenerative disease. By inducing mitochondrial dysfunction, our wireless world may well be driving us all into an early grave.
Cellphone Industry Hides Truth by Manufacturing Doubt
Considering the research data now available, you’d think everyone would understand and accept the fact that EMF is a serious health danger, yet many are still completely in the dark. With “EMF*D,” I hope to help more people understand this biological threat.
In 2011, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency EMFs as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”2 Then, in 2018, the U.S. National Toxicology Program published two lifetime exposure studies conclusively showing cellphone exposure causes cancer.
The NTP’s findings were also duplicated by the Italian Ramazzini Institute just a couple of months later. In the wake of these studies, Fiorella Belpoggi, principal investigator and director of the Ramazzini Institute, urged the IARC to upgrade RF-EMF to “probably carcinogenic” or higher.3
Now, just like smoking cigarettes, EMF exposure takes decades before its effects become evident (and even then, the health problem might not be directly linkable to EMF exposure), and this is a significant part of the problem as it allows the telecom industry to — just like the tobacco industry before it — whitewash concerns, manipulate research and prevent proper safety studies from being done.
There’s no doubt cellphone manufacturers are aware that EMFs from cellphones contribute to health problems, though. The evidence has been published for decades, and new research is constantly being added.
However, by downplaying positive findings and saying that findings of harm are inconclusive — in other words, by creating doubt and controversy — they effectively prevent the public from knowing the truth and demanding safer products.
Wireless Industry Is Even Worse Than the Tobacco Industry
Another wireless industry strategy that prevents the problem from becoming public knowledge is the capturing of our federal regulatory agencies, which the tobacco industry wasn’t even capable of.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all warned people about smoking, yet the tobacco industry continued successfully selling cigarettes for another 20 or 30 years. The wireless industry, on the other hand, has captured the federal regulatory agencies, which prevents those warnings from being issued in the first place.
For example, the chief lobbyist for the wireless industry, Tom Wheeler, was appointed by President Obama to be the head of the Federal Communications Commission, which is a most egregious example of the fox guarding the hen house. Not surprisingly, then, in December 2019 the FCC announced they’re going to fund rural 5G deployment to the tune of $9 billion!4
The telecom industry has engaged in a vast and illegal fraud where, for decades, basic telephone rate payers — wire line customers — have funded the deployment of wireless in general, and now 5G in particular, through their phone bills.
This illegal redirection of funds amounts to about $1 trillion over the past 15 years, and without this money, 5G would not have been possible in the first place. Were the wireless industry forced to pay its fair share of infrastructure costs, 5G simply wouldn’t be economically feasible as a consumer product.
What’s so Great About 5G?
What exactly is 5G and why do some people want it? In short, it’s all about improving speed. Compared to 4G, 5G is 100 times faster. On a side note, you can determine what your bandwidth is by pulling up fast.com on your cellphone’s browser. If you’re on 4G, your bandwidth is probably not going to exceed 10 megabytes per second (mb/s). If you’re on 5G, it’s going to be between 500 and 800 mb/s.
So, the primary benefit of 5G is noticeably faster speed. The vast majority of people simply don’t need this kind of bandwidth, but it has great applications for commercial uses such as self-driving cars.
The problem is, 5G may end up making the earth uninhabitable for many who are already struggling with electrosensitivity, and the countless others for whom 5G may prove to be the thing that tips them over the edge into electrohypersensitivity syndrome.
Elon Musk’s Starlink project, which was slated to deploy up to 42,000 satellites into low earth orbit, will blanket the entire planet with 5G internet. You won’t be able to escape it, no matter how far into the wilderness you go.
5G Is a Prescription for Biological Disaster
Then there are the long-term dangers of 5G, which we still do not have a complete picture of. There has not been a single safety study done on 5G. Studies using 2G, 3G and 4G, however, including the NTP and Ramazzini studies, clearly show there’s cause for concern.
5G is more complex, as it uses a variety of frequencies, which makes it a potentially greater threat. The frequency of 4G is typically around 2 to 5 gigahertz (GHz), while 5G will be around 20 to 30 GHz, initially.
Eventually, it may go as high as 80 GHz, which will cause problems for people trying to remediate exposures because there are currently no inexpensive meters that can measure frequencies that high.
Based on the studies already done on previous generations of wireless, we know it’s harmful, and 5G is only going to make matters worse, as it will dramatically increase our exposures. 5G requires what essentially amounts to a mini cellphone tower outside every fifth or sixth house on every block.
We also have studies showing the impact of millimeter waves, which is what 5G is using, on insects, animals and plants, and those hazards are well-documented. So, it doesn’t just pose a problem for human health, but for the ecosystem as a whole.
Martin Pall, Ph.D., wrote an excellent paper explaining how EMFs affect your voltage gated calcium channels (VGCCs) — channels in the outer plasma membrane of your cells. Each VGCC has a voltage sensor, a structure that detects electrical changes across the plasma membrane and opens the channel. EMFs work through the voltage sensor to activate the channel and radically increase intracellular calcium levels into dangerous ranges.
Similar channels are found in most biological life, including animals, insects, plants and trees. So, flooding the planet with these frequencies will undoubtedly have serious biological consequences across the ecosystem. As such, it’s an existential threat to humanity.
One biological consequence is arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). Other potential consequences include autism and Alzheimer’s. Heart and neurological problems top the list because your heart and brain have the greatest density of VGCCs. Men’s testes also have a very high density of VGCCs and, indeed, we have evidence showing EMFs increase men’s risk of infertility.
Everything points to these frequencies being a prescription for biological disaster, and between skyrocketing autism, Alzheimer’s and infertility rates, how can a society be sustained? It can’t. It will be extinguished.
We Don’t Need Wireless 5G
In reality, we can still get the bandwidth of 5G without 5G wireless. The alternative would be to deploy fiber optic cable. It’s faster, safer and less expensive.
Unfortunately, the money originally set aside to implement nationwide fiber optics was rerouted and illegally used to build the wireless infrastructure instead. This is why a group called The Irregulators5 are now suing the FCC to put a stop to the illegal subsidy to the wireless industry.
Wireline customers paid for an upgrade to fast and safe fiber optic wiring across the nation, but now we’re getting harmful 5G wireless instead. This lawsuit has the potential to alter the telecommunications industry from the ground up, and may be the “weapon” we need to halt to the 5G rollout in the U.S.
The Importance of EMF Avoidance to Protect Your NAD+ Level
Along with practical remediation strategies, “EMF*D” also covers things you can do to protect yourself on a biochemical level. A perfect storm of DNA and cellular protein and membrane destruction is created when you aren’t burning fat for fuel (which creates excess superoxide) and then get exposed to EMFs.
This causes a radical increase in nitric oxide release that nearly instantaneously combines with superoxide to create enormous levels of peroxynitrate, which triggers a cascade of destructive events to your cellular and mitochondrial DNA, membranes and proteins.
Although all biologic damage is of concern, it is the DNA strand breaks that are most concerning as they will lead to a radical increase in inflammation and virtually all degenerative diseases.
The good news is your body has the ability to repair this damaged DNA with a family of enzymes called poly ADP ribose polymerase or PARP It is a very effective repair system and works wonderfully to repair the damage as long as it has enough fuel in the form of NAD+.
The bad news is many of us are running low on this fuel. When excess peroxynitrate activates PARP to repair the DNA damage, it consumes NAD+, and if you run out, you can’t repair the damage. This appears to be a central cause for most of the diseases we now see in the modern world.
Optimizing your NAD+ levels may be the single most important strategy for improving your mitochondrial health. The first step is to reduce NAD+ consumption by the correct diet (low in processed foods and net carbohydrates and higher in healthy fats), along with EMF avoidance, as recent research shows NAD+ levels dramatically drop when exposed to EMFs.
Time restricted eating is also very helpful, as is exercise, both of which are powerful, inexpensive and safe ways to boost your NAD+ level.
Helpful Strategies to Limit EMF Damage
In “EMF*D” I also cover the Nrf2 pathway and the importance of minerals such as magnesium to limit the biological damage caused by EMFs. As explained in this interview, upregulating your Nrf2 pathway activates genes that have powerful antioxidant effects, thus helping protect against EMF damage, while magnesium — which is a natural calcium channel blocker — helps reduce the effects of EMF on your VGCCs.
On a side note, molecular hydrogen tablets are an excellent source of ionic elemental magnesium. Each tablet provides about 80 milligrams of ionic elemental magnesium.
Addressing EMF Pollution — A 21st Century Health Imperative
There’s no doubt in my mind that EMF exposure is an important lifestyle component that needs to be addressed if you’re concerned about your health, which is why I spent three years writing “EMF*D.”
My aim was to create a comprehensive and informative guide, detailing not only the risks, but also what you can do to mitigate unavoidable exposures. If you know or suspect you might already be developing a sensitivity to EMFs (full-blown hypersensitivity can often strike seemingly overnight), mitigating your exposures will be particularly paramount.
Many sufferers become obsessed with finding solutions, as the effects can be severely crippling. My book can be a valuable resource in your quest for relief.
The EMF Experts website6 also lists EMF groups worldwide, to which you can turn with questions, concerns and support. Should you need help remediating your home, consider hiring a trained building biologist to get it done right.
Brian Hoyer, a leading EMF expert7 and a primary consultant for “EMF*D” also has a company called Shielded Healing that can provide a thorough analysis of the EMF exposure in your home, and help you devise a remediation plan.
Time series analysis of New Zealand data supports a relationship between mRNA vaccination and death that is consistent with a German autopsy study.
On 14th December 2022, Medsafe (NZ Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority) released its 46th report into the safety of Covid vaccines entitled “Adverse events following immunisation with COVID-19 vaccines”. The report covered safety signals up to 30th November 2022.
This report contained new advice about the risk of death following mRNA vaccination. Medsafe’s assessment began as follows:
“By chance, some people will experience new illnesses or die from a pre-existing condition shortly after vaccination, especially if they are elderly. Therefore, part of our review process includes comparing natural death rates to observed death rates following vaccination, to determine if there are any specific trends or patterns that might indicate a vaccine safety concern.”
The report comes after months of speculation concerning record levels of excess all cause mortality in New Zealand affecting all ages, currently running at 15% above historical levels.
After dropping the bombshell news, Medsafe goes through an entirely bogus and unscientific process designed to reassure the public that there is nothing to worry about. Medsafe compares the number of deaths reported to CARM (Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring) within 21 days of vaccination to the background rate of deaths from natural causes. In doing so, it omits to mention (but does so elsewhere) that CARM reports are voluntary and massively underreported by an estimated factor of 20 times. As a result there is nothing at all reassuring about this safety report.
Are There Other Reasons to Be Concerned? Yes, Many:
1. Medsafe reports, “There have been no deaths reported for the Vaxzevria or Nuvaxovid vaccines.” So why are they happening after the Pfizer vaccine?
2. Autopsies are not routinely performed in New Zealand following deaths proximate to vaccination. A recently published German study Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination reports 16% of deaths within 20 days of mRNA vaccination exhibit definitive causal symptoms of acute myocarditis, a known adverse effect of Pfizer Covid vaccination. So why is there no concerted effort here in NZ to investigate by routinely performing autopsies?
3. The Ministry of Health has consistently refused/omitted to record vaccine status on death certificates or make CARM reporting mandatory. This makes it very difficult to scientifically and reliably investigate any causal relationship between mRNA vaccination and death or serious illness. On the 17th December 2021 the director of the Covid immunisation programme wrote to me on behalf of Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health, saying “An accurate measurement of all adverse events is not required”.
In the light of today’s Medsafe admission, that’s damning. Incredibly Dr. Bloomfield has just been appointed the inaugural chair of a new public policy impact institute at the University of Auckland, proposing to translate and apply research into policies that directly impact communities—but he doesn’t subscribe to accuracy??? Most people do, especially academics.
4. Medsafe argues that temporal correlation between deaths and vaccination does not prove a causal relationship between them. They, along with epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker, suggest that Covid infection or pre-existing health conditions are more likely to be causally connected to deaths following vaccination. There are in fact other relevant analyses which can determine whether there is a relationship between mRNA vaccination and proximate deaths. Among these, powerful techniques of time series analysis can discover whether deaths are consistently occurring during specific intervals of time after vaccination. This would provide strong support for a causal relationship.
Among the world’s nations, New Zealand is in a unique position to undertake this sort of analysis. In 2021 New Zealand had very few Covid infections (almost none) but the majority of the population were vaccinated over a period of eight months. Therefore deaths recorded during much of 2021 in New Zealand cannot be ascribed to any effect of Covid infection.
Preliminary data from 2021 has been analysed to investigate the proposition that mRNA vaccination resulted in deaths. This shows there is a significant (p=0.045) relationship between number of vaccines administered by week and weekly deaths at a lag of one week. In other words, there is a statistically significant increased chance of dying within a few days of vaccination. Download the study here. Despite the preliminary nature of the data in this study, the findings of this study are consistent with the findings of German autopsies. Therefore there should be more rigorous study of stored data to further test these findings
There are other simple methods to analyse death data. For example taking the date of inoculation for each individual as a notional point in time around which all death data can be assessed for entire cohorts of individuals. This would reveal whether death rates before and after inoculation differ.
5. The time series analysis does not preclude the possibility that other deaths at longer time intervals after an inoculation date may be occurring as a result of mRNA vaccination. Unprecedented rates of all cause mortality suggest this is likely to be the case. Unfortunately, the New Zealand Ministry of Health is not releasing data on causes of hospitalisation by category of illness. There is evidence we have previously reported based on US defence personal data and insurance statistics, and on UK ONS data, indicating that incidence of neurological disorders, cancers, cardiac events, and strokes have increased.
Medsafe’s position on vaccine safety has clearly shifted during the two months since it last published a safety report, but has it realised the importance of more reliable causal assessments? Apparently not. The NZ public is being kept in the dark about vaccine safety as it has been for the last two years. Bland assurances of safety continue without foundation in fact.
Can mRNA Vaccination Be a Trigger Event for Death if You Are Already Sick or Elderly?
The wording of the December 14th Medsafe warning is strange and ambiguous: “..some people will experience new illnesses or die from a pre-existing condition shortly after vaccination, especially if they are elderly”. So are the elderly especially liable to die after vaccination because of vaccination or because they are elderly? We aren’t told.
Aside from the obviously elevated rates of excess all cause deaths, anecdotal reports from rest home staff suggest this is the case. Emergency vehicles and helicopters are answering more frequent calls. Hospitals are overwhelmed and unable to cope. Whistleblowers among nurses are talking about overflowing cardiac wards. A top UK cardiologist has suggested that the evidence of harm is overwhelming and irrefutable. Funeral home workers in New Zealand and overseas have spoken publicly about strange rubbery clots in arteries which have been confirmed by experienced pathologists in the USA. Statistically improbable increases in life insurance claims data have been noted. Sudden unexplained deaths have a high profile in the media. The message is consistent—something unprecedented and very concerning is going on.
Despite having multiple sources of data and methods of analysis available to it. Medsafe has relied for two years on a single obviously flawed method of comparing CARM data to background rates, despite admitting CARM data is underreported. How strange is that? This deficiency is fatal to Medsafe’s claims of safety. It is scientifically unjustifiable and it wouldn’t meet publication criteria.
There is no possible justification for omitting to use more reliable forms of causal investigation. Medsafe has avoided public accountability by refusing to debate the issues publicly, omitting publication of key health data, massaging published data, and unforgivably accusing critics of spreading disinformation. These approaches are worthy of a dictatorship but not a modern democracy.
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