Natural Sweetener Stevia Loaded With Antioxidants; Protects Against DNA Damage
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(NaturalNews) Extracts from the leaf of the Stevia plant have been
found to be high in antioxidants that prevent the DNA damage that leads
to cancer, according to a new Indian study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
"These results indicate that Stevia rebaudiana may be useful as a
potential source of natural antioxidants," said lead author Srijani
Ghanta, of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata.
This is good news for stevia, the natural sweetener that has been suppressed for decades by the FDA, but which is now about to go mainstream thanks to interest from Coca-Cola and Cargill.
Stevia rebaudiana is a South American shrub that grows in semi-arid areas of Brazil
and Paraguay. The leaves of the plant have been used for generations as
a sweetener, originally by the Guarani people and more recently
throughout South America and Asia. A campaign of intimidation against stevia companies by the FDA has so far prevented the sweetener from being approved for use in foods in the United States
or Europe, but it is currently sold as a supplement and has gained
mainstream acceptance as a safe, natural, calorie-free sweetener.
The FDA, of course, suppressed stevia as a way to propel the sales of aspartame,
the artificial chemical sweetener that was pushed through FDA approval
by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Aspartame has never been shown to
be safe for human consumption in any honest studies.
Stevia as a powerful antioxidant
In the research on stevia mentioned here, researchers used two different chemicals (methanol and ethyl acetate) to obtain extracts from the leaves of the stevia plant. These extracts were found to contain a variety of antioxidants including apigenin, kaempferol and quercitrin.
The
antioxidant activity of the extracts was tested with a
2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay to
determine how much extract would be needed to remove half of the free
radicals from a solution. For methanol extract, 47.66 micrograms per
milliliter extract were needed, while only 9.26 micrograms per
milliliter were needed of ethyl acetate extract. When tested against
hydroxide radicals, the amount of ethyl acetate needed dropped to 3.08
micrograms per milliliter.
The researchers then tested the extracts' ability to protect DNA
strands against damage by hydroxide radicals. It only took 0.1
milligrams per liter of ethyl acetate extract to inhibit DNA strand
damage. DNA damage has been linked to a variety of diseases, especially cancer, reproductive problems and developmental defects. Halting DNA damage is also a key to longevity.
The recent research may add a boost to anticipated efforts to secure FDA approval for stevia as a food additive in the United States. Stevia extract has 300 times the sweetness of sugar, and it mixes easily into foods or beverages.
It causes no significant increase in blood sugar levels, making it safe
for diabetics. While many stevia extracts have a slightly bitter
aftertaste reminiscent of licorice, a number of manufacturers claim to
have figured out how to eliminate this.
Already sold as a
sweetener in a variety of countries including Brazil, Canada, China and
Japan, stevia has not yet been approved for use in the United States or
the European Union. Although stevia had been used for decades without
any reports of health problems, the FDA labeled it an "unsafe food
additive" in 1991 and restricted its use to dietary supplements. It
also placed restrictions on the importation of stevia, even going so
far as to demand that a recipe book publisher destroy its books that
mentioned stevia in recipes. |
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The FDA's conspiracy to marginalize stevia |
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The FDA says that
"toxicological information on stevia is inadequate to demonstrate its
safety." Yet the regulation of stevia as unsafe was a break with FDA
policy, which normally grants generally recognized as safe (GRAS)
status to any natural substance used since 1958 or earlier with no
reports of negative effects. The 1991 decision came in response to an
anonymous petition! In other words, someone wrote the FDA and wanted
stevia banned (guess who?) and the FDA obliged.
A number of
studies have suggested that stevia might cause problems with energy
metabolism or the reproductive system, and that a component of stevia
might transform into a mutagenic compound. But other studies have
failed to find health consequences to stevia use, and have even
suggested that it might be beneficial. In 2006, the World Health
Organization (WHO) concluded, after a thorough review of recent
research on stevia and its related compounds, that stevia does not
damage the genes of humans or other animals, and that many of the toxic
effects seen in laboratory studies do not occur in living cells. The
WHO also noted that stevia has shown some beneficial effects for
patients with high blood pressure or Type 2 diabetes.
Even the
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which supports more
research into stevia before allowing its use as a food additive, says
that there is no risk to the sweetener in small doses.
"If you
use stevia sparingly (once or twice a day in cup of tea, for example),
it isn't a great threat to you," the CSPI web site says. "But if stevia
were marketed widely and used in diet sodas, it would be consumed by
millions of people. And that might pose a public health threat."
Here at NaturalNews,
we disagree. Stevia is safely consumed by hundreds of millions of
people around the world, with absolutely no adverse health effects.
It's as safe as drinking tea. And compared to the dangers of aspartame,
Sucralose, saccharin, and other chemical sweeteners, stevia is by far
the better choice.
Under mandate from the European Commission,
the European Food Safety Agency has recently begun a safety assessment
and scientific evaluation of stevia. Meanwhile, the FDA has said that
it expects to receive a petition for the sweetener's use in food and
beverages any day.
The Coca-Cola Company and Cargill have teamed
up to begin marketing a stevia-derived sweetener called Rebiana, and
hope to gain approval for the product in both the United States and
Europe. With its usual approach to intellectual property, Coca-Cola has
already filed 24 U.S. patent ingredients for stevia.
Ingredient
companies are gearing up for when the ingredient gets approved in these
two large markets. The Malaysian company PureCircle is raising $50
million to expand its stevia production threefold over two years, and
the U.S. company Blue California is preparing its infrastructure for
large-scale production.
Without question, the days of the FDA
being able to suppress stevia are finally coming to an end, and the
reign of aspartame is nearly over. That's great news for consumers, and
bad news for the cancer industry, for once aspartame is replaced with
stevia, cancer rates will plummet.
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Hollywood takes on the
MMR jab
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Sunday Express 12
October 2008 By Lucy Johnston
As celebrities voice their concerns about the
triple vaccine and measles outbreaks continue to plague Britain , Health Editor,
LUCY JOHNSTON speaks exclusively to Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who started the
debate
When Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong, and actress Jenny
McCarthy hosted a fundraising gala in California recently for families convinced
that MMR caused autism in their children, a debate that has never really gone
away was thrown to the fore once more.
The star-studded event in aid of
Ante Up For Autism, highlighted the fact that the controversy surrounding the
triple vaccine is now becoming a celebrity issue.
Meanwhile, in Britain ,
last week saw the 20th anniversary of the controversial triple jab.
High
profile critics of MMR now include actor Jim Carrey, his girlfriend Jenny
McCarthy, and the all-girl rock group the Dixie Chicks.
McCarthy and
Carrey were recently given an hour on the Oprah Winfrey Show to promote her new
best-selling book, Mother Warriors, which maintains that vaccines can trigger
autism in infants. She says her 6-year-old son Evan developed the symptoms
following his triple jab.
"After the MMR Evan started having seizures,"
she said. "After I treated his medical issues, which the medical establishment
continues to ignore, my son recovered from autism and he is not the only one. I
talked to 60,000 mothers and kept hearing the same story.
"Vaccines are
safe for some children and not for others. We want to reduce the number of
vaccines. We want the toxic ingredients removed and independent safety studies
carried out.
Few parents questioned the use of the combined vaccine when
it was introduced into the UK in October 1988. However things changed
irrevocably in 1998 when Dr Andrew Wakefield, then a gut specialist at London 's
Royal Free Hospital published an explosive article in The Lancet linking autism
with MMR.
The medical establishment and government turned on Dr
Wakefield. He was forced out of his job and has been blamed for the significant
drop in uptake of MMR, leading to fears over the widespread return of the
diseases the jab is designed to protect against.
Last week, a Health
Protection Agency spokesman pleaded with parents to give their children the MMR,
pointing to new figures that revealed an increase of 231 cases of measles from
2006 -2007, bringing the total number to 971. Overall vaccination rates are
currently running at 85 per cent across the country but some areas such as
London have rates as low as 49 per cent.
Wakefield , a father of four, is
now based in Texas , where he operates a charity-run clinic called Thoughtful
House for treatment of and research into autism. About 2,000 autistic children
are being treated. Dr Wakefield and two other colleagues, Professor Simon Murch
and Professor John Walker-Smith, are currently awaiting a decision from the
General Medical Council about whether the research they conducted in the UK
breached ethical codes.
In a rare and exclusive interview with the Sunday
Express Dr Wakefield defended himself against critics and denied he was
"courting celebrities" to promote his theory.
"I have only met Jenny
McCarthy a couple of times. I have never tried to influence her," he said. "She
has her own story to tell about how she blames the vaccine for her son's autism.
Her story is so similar to that of many other mothers who say their children
were developing normally until they had the MMR jab between 12- and 18-months,
when they developed a form of regressive autism. She is an important voice and I
have tremendous respect for her courage in speaking out."
Dr Wakefield
and his team identified a bowel disorder that causes "leaky guts". He theorised
that the virus damages the gut, leading to inflammation and secondary injury to
the developing brain. He believes this syndrome, unique to some autistic
children, could be caused by the triple jab after studies found the measles part
of the vaccine virus present in the gut.
His critics pronounce him a
maverick but his work has since been replicated by other studies from Italy ,
South America and various centers in the US .
American researchers
revealed in 2006 that 85 per cent of samples taken from 82 autistic children
contained the vaccine strain of the measles virus.
Recently the former
head of the National Institute of Health in the US and the head of the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have acknowledged that poor
study design may have led to underestimation of the risk of autism following
vaccines.
Wakefield said no parent of the children treated at the Royal
Free or at Thoughtful House had ever complained about his work and that his aim
was to make sure the children's problems are recognised and treated
appropriately.
"My sole purpose is to help these children and get to
grips with the root of the problem, which is what I am doing," he said. "Despite
having discovered an apparently new disease my colleagues and I are being
vilified purely because of the vaccine association. This link has threatened
Government policy and drug-company profit. What we're witnessing over the triple
jab is a propaganda campaign based on who has the biggest budget. I have none
while the budget of the UK Government and its allies is limitless."
Dr
Wakefield, who is to publish a book, The Lesser Truth, on his experiences over
the controversy next year, added: "Unfortunately much of Britain 's media has
bought into this propaganda lock, stock and barrel. Without the manpower or
financial back up, I have waited, watched and just got on with my work. Now the
time has come to tell the story."
He cites parallels between his story
and that of Dr. William McBride, the Australian gynaecologist who first alerted
the world to the danger of thalidomide, the morning sickness drug that caused
widespread foetal malformation, in 1961 in a letter to The Lancet. Drug
manufacturers and European governments resisted the withdrawal of thalidomide
until the weight of evidence and media pressure was overwhelming.
Do
government's still conceal evidence and cover up?
The Sunday Express has
discovered evidence that health officials failed to warn of serious risks linked
with the MMR jab before it was introduced.
According to a secret dossier,
five cases were reported of potentially deadly brain inflammation following the
use of MMR in Canada before it became part of standard childhood vaccinations in
Britain .
The internal documents from the Government's Joint Committee on
Vaccination and Immunisation meeting also reveal reports that another brand of
MMR had caused "neurological complications" from the measles component of the
vaccine in the US . The minutes of the committee on vaccination meeting in 1988,
released under the Freedom of Information Act, blame the mumps component of the
vaccine, called Urabe, for five cases of brain inflammation.
Despite
this, from 1988 these brands were administered routinely without any warning of
serious risk until the two brands that contained the Urabe mumps strain were
withdrawn four years later because of health fears.
Some children died or
were seriously brain damaged by this vaccine. One of these was Hannah Buxton,
who was 18 months old when she reacted to her first MMR jab given in the first
week of the new campaign. She started having fits and died 18 months later in
February 1992.
Parents Carol and Tony of Towcester, Northants, did not
know Hannah had been given the strain of vaccine later withdrawn after it was
deemed unsafe. In March 1992 a Government tribunal blamed the vaccine for her
death and the family was awarded a vaccine damage payment.
Dr Peter
Fletcher, former Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of Health, is also
sceptical about the Government's position and the safety of the triple
jab.
In a previous interview he said: "The refusal by governments to
evaluate the risks properly will make this one of the greatest scandals in
medical history. There are very powerful people in positions of great authority
who have staked their reputations on the safety of MMR and they are willing to
do almost anything to protect themselves."
Wakefield does not claim he is
right about the link with autism but he believes it needs investigating, not
ridiculing. In the meantime he says the Government should offer parents the
choice of single vaccines. He has, he says, privately asked vaccine policy
makers why this is not happening and been told that "offering single jabs would
destroy the triple jab programme."
This, he feels is not good enough.
"The first priority should be to protect children from infection with safe
vaccines. A cloud of doubt has been cast over the safety of MMR and parents
should have a choice."
However, parents looking for this choice are
finding it increasingly difficult to obtain single jabs with the handful of
private clinics offering them often running out of supplies.
The
Department of Health insists the vaccine is safe. A spokesperson said: "We
believe that the vaccine has an excellent safety record and studies have
confirmed this. Neither population-based studies or studies in individual
children have confirmed a link between MMR vaccine and autism."
However,
with Hollywood 's renewed interest it seems this important debate has moved ever
further from a resolution.
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Disclaimer: The
information contained within does not take the place of medical
diagnosis or prescription. See your health care provider in case of
sickness. |
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| Your dental fillings are
toxic |
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Your dental fillings are
toxic, the world's major health regulator finally admits
Amalgam fillings in our teeth are toxic and harmful to our health,
America's health regulator, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), finally admitted recently after claiming for years
that they were safe.
This unprecedented about-turn marks the sudden end
of a lawsuit that had been mounted by advocacy groups, such as Moms Against
Mercury, who are seeking to ban the use of mercury in amalgam fillings and
children's vaccinations.
In an official statement, which has been posted
on the FDA website, the regulator admitted that mercury-containing dental
fillings "may have neuro-toxic effects on the nervous systems of developing
children and fetuses."
The statement puts the US in line with a handful
of other countries that already ban the use of mercury fillings in pregnant
women. The FDA is calling for further research, and may announce a complete ban
on amalgam fillings.
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Comfrey for Body & Back Pains
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From Ray Collins'
THE GOOD LIFE LETTER
If anyone has a garden to grow
Comfrey, it looks a bit like Lily of the Valley.
When grown the roots can
be taken, washed dried and steeped in Vodka for 10 days. It is then
ready to use as a 'rub' for many aches and pains.
I used to work in a bar and one day
I gave this remedy to a man who had a broken ankle which still
troubled
him after a year, when after a couple of days he came into the bar and
actually jumped over
the bar itself to show that he was once again
perfectly fit.
Hope you enjoy this
story.
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| Allergies & Asthma Report: common foods that help you breathe more
easily |
A report in the medical journal Allergy in June 2008 came up with a
very pleasing suggestion.... that eating delicious, hearty Mediterranean food
could relieve asthma symptoms.
The study was carried out by a team at the University of Porto in Portugal. They looked closely at the diet of 174 asthmatics. They found that those who ate large quantities of Mediterranean foods had fewer attacks and flare-ups.
So what's a Mediterranean diet?
Well, this is generally presumed to be a diet high in fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts and low in saturated fats.
This is the principle diet in Crete, for example. An estimated 80% of the children there eat fresh fruit at least twice a day. And over two-thirds of them eat fresh vegetables, twice a day.
On that island, very few children have asthma or hay fever.
The main fruits recommended by the report's authors include oranges, apples, tomatoes and grapes.
The study also found that asthmatics who eat nuts at least three times a week are less likely to wheeze. As well as vitamin E, nuts also contain a lot of magnesium, which helps boost your lung power.
The report concludes: "High adherence to a Mediterranean diet reduced by 78 per cent the risk of uncontrolled asthma." |
| What NEVER to eat if you're asthmatic
or allergic |
The study found that children who ate lots of margarine DOUBLED their chances of asthma and allergic rhinitis (which causes hay fever-like symptoms).
This backs up an Australian study from 2001. Those researchers also concluded that a diet high in polyunsaturated fats - found in many margarines - can double a child's chances of having asthma.
In 2001, Dr Warren Lenney, a spokesperson for the British Thoracic Society (BTS), said:
"It would be sensible for parents to lessen their children's intake of margarine and foods regularly fried in polyunsaturated oil as part of a diet rich in fruit and vegetables."
As always, more research needs to be done to establish links and causes.
But whatever they discover in the coming years, I'd advise that you give margarine a wide berth. It's a synthetic food high in trans-fatty acids. A substance that many critics claim that it can triple your risk of coronary heart disease.
In 2006, Professor Marion Nestle, a respected professor of Nutrition at New York University wrote:
"All margarines are basically the same, mixtures of soybean oil and food additives. Everything else is theatre and greasepaint."
Michael Pollan, the author of In Defence of Food (Allen Lane, 2008) puts it even more bluntly:
"The beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking - including the real
wincer that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer."
So perhaps it's best avoided, then!
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