Deadly catch: Contaminated seafood, anyone?

In case you needed one more reason to tout healthy supplemental sources of omega-3s such as krill and fish oil, check out this disturbing ABC News report. Most of our seafood (80 percent) in the U.S. is being imported from developing nations, along with filth, banned chemicals, antibiotics and cheap prices.

Much of the problem resides with farmed fish, apparently. Foreign producers are using things like U.S. banned fungicides (malachite green was the one mentioned in the report) to keep the number of parasites down. Fish in Vietnam are being farmed in sewage water. Loads of antibiotics are being used to stave off the infections that would otherwise kill the fish being farmed in crowded pens.

America’s food-supply chain is a mess. Movies like Food, Inc., King Corn, and The World According to Monsanto have begun to awaken some Americans, but until a lot more of us begin demanding better controls on our food … and stop buying stuff just because it is cheap (in the short run), we’re going to slowly poison ourselves.

Is it time for a food revolution yet?

You can read more food and health-related news at WellWise.org

Will Your Multivitamin Kill You?

Pardon the sensationalistic headline, but I am making a point of how the old formula of “playing the fear card” is still considered effective by mass media, in politics as well as something as basic as food and nutrition. I just watched an MSNBC video from The Today Show titled “The Truth About Supplements.”

The title of the segment itself is crafted to create doubt, and the related link that runs across the bottom of the screen is even more explicit: “5 Truths, Lies about the Vitamins in Your Life.” The guest on the segment is Dr. David Katz, a celebrity physician and a Yale physician who reiterates a Reader’s Digest article (the “related link” above), that basically says you’re wasting your money on vitamins and that they may even be dangerous. I can’t imagine what Katz is reading beyond Reader’s Digest, but every day I read scientific studies that come to an opposite conclusion.

Katz claims that it is a “myth” that vitamins can protect against heart disease or cancer. I haven’t seen a lot in the scientific literature about multiple vitamins being studied for prevention of these common killers, but I just came across one today in Medical News Today from the American Association for Cancer Research, about a study on vitamins and calcium supplementation reported on at the organization’s annual conference. Jaime Matta, Ph.D., a professor in the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, said about the study, “It is not an immediate effect. You don't take a vitamin today and your breast cancer risk is reduced tomorrow. However, we did see a long-term effect in terms of breast cancer reduction.”

Then there is the study I referred to in my last blog about omega-3s reducing breast cancer risk by 25 per cent.

To be fair, Katz does say in the end of the interview not to “throw out the baby with the bath water.” He correctly says that we’re all deficient in vitamin D, recommends a minimum of 1,000IU, and that more and more he is recommending krill oil to his patients.

So he’s not against supplementation, as it were, only taking multivitamins … unless they are whole-food vitamins. Makes me wonder if he has a thriving business on the side selling whole-food supplements.

Do You Know the History of Supplements?

If there was ever any doubt in your mind that getting natural products (supplements, etc.) and alternative medicine practices into the mainstream has been a long struggle, you’ll want to read James Gormley’s recent blog. Among the eye-opening tidbits he shares are these:

1910-1930

The American Medical Association (AMA) and a lobby of early “modern” pharmacies are embarrassed by the Flexner Report of 1910 (which made disease-focused, or allopathic, medicine look bad) and work together to mainly run natural medicine “out of town,” focusing especially on Eclectic, naturopathic and homeopathic medical schools. By 1930, aside from osteopathic and chiropractic schools, alternative medicine has been dealt a severe blow.

1960

In December, government agents enter the warehouses of the Balanced Foods Company in New York City and seize many copies of Folk Medicine and Arthritis and Folk Medicine, two popular books by the late doctor, D.C. Jarvis. The agents also seize bottles of vinegar and honey, since they were referred to in Jarvis’ books. The FDA brought suit against Balanced Foods in Federal District Court in New York City on the grounds that the vinegar and honey products constituted “misbranded drugs”! Milton Bass won this case … for consumers and the industry.

1998

FDA inspectors arrive at the offices of a Texas-based stevia company to "witness destruction" of "offending" cookbooks featuring stevia, and other literature. A video camera taping the aborted destruction, and the intercession of Julian Whitaker, M.D. and Jim Turner prevented the book burning.

This last one will probably come as a surprise to many people who now see stevia (Reb-A) being used as an alternative sweetener in soft drinks, among other things. The early pioneers tried for 40 years to get the FDA to even look at stevia as a sweetener. Then when Cargill and Coca Cola teamed up to petition for it last year (because the grassroots have been demanding it), it happened almost overnight. Now stevia is a burgeoning new industry.

The Future of Food

I just returned from a panel discussion at University of Colorado’s famous Conference on World Affairs titled “The Future of Food.”

The panel consisted of Jim Hightower, a well-known radio personality who was elected twice as Texas Agriculture Commissioner; Sarah Rich, a writer specializing in design, food and sustainability; and Terrence McNally, a journalist from Los Angeles and radio host of Free Forum (A World That Just Might Work).

It was a wildly informative session, full of passion and hope. Here’s just a taste of what was said there:

“In the past few decades, control of our food system has passed into the hands of the lawyers, CEOs and accountants of big corporations whose interests are not ours. Food to them is not something you eat or taste, but a profit center.”

“Eaters are participants in the global agriculture systems, not just consumers, though they don’t know it. Industrial eaters are passive and uncritical, and have no connection to the land.”

“The organics movement began as a revolt against corporate food. All of this came from us. It didn’t begin with policymakers or corporations, it began with normal people who wanted to take back control of their food, and it is a growing coalition of people.”

“Some people think that Whole Foods brought the organic foods revolution, but Whole Foods simply rode the wave that was already created.”

“If your calorie intake is 2,000 a day, it takes 20,000 calories of energy to bring it to your table. This is unsustainable.”

“Global warming is a real threat. A rise in temperatures of one-degree celsius brings about a 10 percent decline in crop yields.”

“Perhaps the biggest problem we have to solve in the U.S. is the Agricultural Bill that comes up for vote every five to seven years. It defines U.S. food policy, and is what has created innumerable problems. The vast majority of farm subsidies we pay go for soy and corn, almost none of which reaches our plates as food. For decades, the farm program has focused only on expanding production.”

“Our system is precarious. Food safety is a matter of national security. Eighty percent of our meat production is controlled by only four companies. 300,000 people are hospitalized from food poisoning in the U.S. every year.”

“There exists in all our major cities food deserts, where the only place for miles where you can by anything to eat is at liquor stores.”

“There are 52,000 acres of backyard space in New York City that could be cultivated into vegetable gardens.”

“The future of food is now. It is local, sustainable and unstoppable. Farmer’s markets are growing in number at amazing rates. School lunch program reform is going on all over the nation. There are food festivals in cities all over the nation, restaurants are touting their local and organic sourcing. People are working on zoning for fast food restaurants, and people are working to create school gardens. Michelle Obama is championing organic gardens and raising awareness about the dangers of the obesity epidemic.”

Here are some of the resources the participants recommended:

Websites:

http://civileats.com

www.earth-policy.org

http://stuffedandstarved.org

www.betterschoolfood.org

www.smallplanetinstitute.org

www.i-sis.org.uk

www.organicconsumers.org

Books:

Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times

The Pleasures of Eating

Soil, Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

Read more wellness news at WellWise.org

Good news for women’s hearts

Yet another study of the health benefits of omega-3's, this one published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This was no small study: The Swedish Mammography Cohort analyzed data from 36,234 women over the course of 18 years, 651 of whom experienced heart failure. The researchers found that those women with the highest intake of fatty fish (fish with high amounts of omega-3s) reduced their risk of heart failure by a minimum of 25 percent.

Now compare that with the latest attempt by AstraZeneca to sell its cholesterol- lowering drug Crestor to healthy people, those with perfectly normal cholesterol, written up in the New York Times.

In the studies that the Food and Drug Administration based its approval of Crestor for this expanded use for healthy people, the rate of heart attacks experienced by people who a sugar pill (placebo) was 0.37 percent, it 68 patients out of 8,901 who took the sugar pill. Among those in the study who took Crestor, 0.17 percent, or 31 patients, had heart attacks. That 55 percent relative difference between the two groups translates to only 0.2 percentage points in absolute-- or 2 people out of 1,000.

As the New York Times article said, "Stated another way, 500 people would need to be treated with Crestor for a year to avoid one usually survivable heart attack... At $3.50 a pill, the cost of prescribing Crestor to 500 people for a year would be $680,000 to prevent one heart attack."

So which makes more sense, eating fatty fish once a week (or taking an omega-3 supplement such as fish oil or krill oil), or taking an expensive statin drug that has well-documented side effects?

Read more of the latest wellness news at WellWise.org.