nice article. i use Prevagen. at first i thought it is weird that it is made from jelly fish but it improved my cognitive functions in reducing cellular death and gives me a good boost of energy. I found out about it from http://www.brainopinions.com/prevagen-aequorin-reviews
 
You can try it and see if it helps you.

Prevagen Aequorin Reviews

Prevagen Aequorin is a new anti-aging supplement based on jellyfish, a beneficial nutrient for brain health. Prevagen is a protein obtained from jellyfish that reduces cellular death when taken on a regular basis. Prevagen Aequorin aids by improving energy levels and by maintaining a healthy calcium level in the body. It is recommendable that you take one capsule of Prevagen Aequorin in the morning, on a daily basis.

http://www.brainopinions.com/prevagen-aequorin-reviews

It is brazen enough to co-opt important, Occupy language, such as the "99% spring"; you'd better back it up with solid skills at organizing, an adherence to democratic principles in organizing, and honesty and forthrightness right up front. Unfortunately, at the "99% Spring NVDA training", at least during day one of what is to be a two day training, I found those qualities lacking.

This event was hosted by the First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans at Jefferson and Claiborne. Robert Sullivan, a member of the church, sits on the local board of Move On. For those who know Robert, you'll know him to be a compassionate, savvy organizer with a firm belief in brining diverse peoples and groups together. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert on the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster, and with Occupy.

I speak for myself in my review. Others can and probably do have a very different take on the training event. In addition, I attended just one day of the event.

Although about 140 people signed up for the training, it looked to be about 50 folks that showed up. Taking the slickly prepared 99% Spring training, 60 page organizing workbook to our seats, what unfolded was a rather strict micromanagement of our time, what we spent our thoughts on, minute by minute, and the spoon feeding of important definitions and an assumption that those definitions would be accepted and agreed upon by the majority attending.

There was a disclaimer on the Move On page on which the invitation was extended to attend this training: MoveOn.org Civic Action is hosting the online event registration process but is not responsible for the content or programming of the trainings or for the planning or organization of any specific actions. The 99% Spring is a collaborative effort between many organizations to train over 100,000 Americans in the basics of nonviolent direct action—not an electoral campaign.

All of the trainers were with Move On, although that was not revealed initially. All were women, interestingly enough.  The main organizer who ran the show, at one point, stated Move On doesn't engage in protest because the logistics of defending Move On protesters would prove too daunting given that it’s a national organization. Fine. That's their prerogative. Yet here they are engaged in the training of protesters, when protesting itself is not something they do. Further, at one point this same lead organizer read a definition of Nonviolent Direct Action (NVDA) training versus Civil Disobedience. She distinguished between the two: NVDA does not involve getting arrested, but Civil Disobedience does. In essence, it seems Move On was unwilling to defend its members in civil disobedience. But they weren't there to teach civil disobedience; they were there to teach NVDA. Further, the definition was offered without discussion; I brought it up though when I had the opportunity.

I did point out to the group that there have been over 6500 arrests of Occupy participants since its inception, and that many of the folks participating did not necessarily believe they were likely to be arrested. Nevertheless, good organizers will always prepare for possible arrests, with trainings and cautions. Certainly some folks deliberately choose to provoke arrest. Yet many have come out to support the Occupy movement in ways that by all appearances should not have provoked arrest, and yet resulted in arrest. I’m thinking most recently of folks arrested in New York for writing on the sidewalk with chalk. An honest discussion of these circumstances would serve to educate and open the eyes of folks who perhaps haven't participated in protests. Otherwise, people could choose to participate in NVDA actions with the mistaken belief that arrests don't occur. This is dangerous, in my view, particularly in light of current civil liberty issues in this country.

Solid or Not: A Review of The Coconut Oil Miracle

By Julie Larson

My personal remembrance of coconut oil begins in the late 1980s. I was in junior high and vastly concerned about three things: boys, body image and food. As ignorant as I was in most of what went on in the news, I was an avid movie-goer, as were most of my friends, and we’d heard that (gasp!) the coconut and palm oil in popcorn was making us fat and unhealthy. I remember being happy that they, whoever “they” were, had caught this nefarious oil. I wanted my movie theater popcorn, but I didn’t want to be fat.

Little did I know that the wives of soybean farmers (probably my grandma) were at their farmhouse tables writing letters to government policymakers that would indeed affect my image of what makes something healthy, and of my own health, as I’m an avid user of oils.

The tropical oils debate centered on the fact that they are saturated fats; coconut oil is highly saturated. It “contains as much as 92 percent saturated fat—more than any other oil, including beef fat and lard” (20), says Bruce Fife, author of The Coconut Oil Miracle, and the guy who says this saturation is part of the miracle of coconut oil.

Fife aims to re-educate oil eaters everywhere by setting some facts straight on saturated fats, and showing how these fats stack up against the purported healthy fats: polyunsaturated fats found in many vegetable oils. Much of what he says, which is clearly backed up by scientific evidence (in the “references” section in the back of the book, in case you’d like to slog your way through articles from journals like the American Medical News and the Journal of Infectious Diseases). His thorough explanations of how things work are scientific, although with easy enough prose to not be turned off or confused.

Coconut oil contains three medium-chain fatty acids—lauric acid, caprylic acid and capric acid—in a combination that’s beneficial to human health because they are highly (although not completely) saturated.

Fife argues that “because saturated fats have no double-carbon bonds—the weak links that are easily broken to form free radicals—they are much more stable under a variety of conditions” (30). Alternately, exposure to heat, light or oxygen can damage polyunsaturated oils. Non-saturated oils that have been oxidized, like olive oil, can oxidize the food you add these oils to. The resulting free radicals have been linked to numerous health ills.

        We disagree here.  The FDA is corrupt.  The FDA has not been serving our interests since Harvey Wiley was fired.

        "Long story. In 1910 Harvey Wiley, MD was the first head of the original FDA. Dr. Wiley was a big critic of food adulteration. He was against bleached flour, refined sugar, and the sale of adulterated, devitalized foods. He once tried to prevent the Coca Cola company from shipping Coke across interstate lines because it had white sugar in it, which Dr. Wiley correctly described as an adulterated food.

        "Then Wiley actually began seizing shipments of bleached flour. A legal battle ensued and went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1913. Wiley won. Bleach was proven to be an empty filler whose main purpose was to kill bugs and bulk up the flour. This law has never been enforced, or reversed either. Soon thereafter the huge financial interests controlling food processing banded together and got Wiley thrown out of office. "
http://www.thedoctorwithin.com/enzymes/enzymes-the-key-to-longevity/

        Are you familiar with Iatrogenesis?  Check out the article below.  Long article.  Lot of footnotes.

Death by Medicine
By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD 
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_01.htm

Laws imposing criminal penalties for engaging in necessary life activities when there are no other public options that exist have been found to violate the Eighth Amendment.... In addition to violating domestic law, criminalization measures may also violate international human rights law, specifically the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This article may be reprinted free of charge provided 1) that there is clear attribution to the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, and 2) that both the OMNS free subscription link http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, April 10, 2012

Top Vitamin D Papers of 2011
Dosage Recommendations and Clinical Applications

by William B. Grant, Ph.D.

(OMNS April 10, 2012) The biggest vitamin D story in 2011 was the report on dietary reference intakes for calcium and vitamin D from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) [1]. This report was prepared during a two-year process by 14 nutrition experts, with funding from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health and Health Canada. The committee reviewed the evidence for beneficial and harmful effects of vitamin D, relying solely on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of its liking for benefits, and prospective cohort studies for adverse effects. RCTs were considered to have the highest quality, with observational studies of moderate quality and ecological studies of very low quality. However, the case can be made that since solar UVB is the primary source of vitamin D for most people, observational and ecological studies are the most relevant and therefore are of high quality, and in fact, have provided most of the information on the health benefits of vitamin D. However, the committee appeared to have a bias of excluding RCTs on such outcomes as cancer and influenza incidence and effects during pregnancy that were not in line with its eventual recommendations. The only benefit the committee found for vitamin D was for bone health. The committee recommended 600 IU/d vitamin D and a serum 25(OH)D concentration (a precursor to the active form of vitamin D) of 20 ng/ml (50 nmol/l) for those aged 1-70 years, and 800 IU/d for those 71 years or older. One-third of Americans have serum 25(OH)D concentrations below 20 ng/ml. The consensus from a wide variety of studies for the optimal concentration is at least 30 ng/ml and more likely over 40 ng/ml based on observational studies. The committee also noted that some prospective studies found increased risk of some health outcomes for higher serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations. However, such studies are bedeviled by changes in serum 25(OH)D concentration during the follow-up period since only one value from the time of enrollment is used.

Recommendations Still Too Low

This report has been severely criticized by the vitamin D research community, with over 125 journal publications to date disagreeing with the recommendations. A representative paper stated: "The IOM recommendations for vitamin D fail in a major way on logic, on science, and on effective public health guidance. Moreover, by failing to use a physiological referent, the IOM approach constitutes precisely the wrong model for development of nutritional policy." [2]. The case could be made that the IOM committee, by setting the recommended dose so unreasonably low, is putting the U.S. population at greatly increased health risk. Further, much of the rest of the world's countries look to the IOM report for guidance, placing a major portion of the world's population at risk.

More recently, a committee of the U.S. Endocrine Society comprised of vitamin D researchers reviewed the evidence and issued their recommendations. They considered both skeletal and non-skeletal effects. They recommended 600-1000 IU/d vitamin D for those aged 1-18 years and 1500-2000 IU/d for those aged 19 years or older [3]. These doses are preferable because they have a reasonable likelihood of raising serum 25(OH)D concentrations above 30 ng/ml (75 nmol/l).

Pregnancy

Meanwhile, the evidence of beneficial effects of vitamin D continues to grow. One RCT ignored by the IOM committee was that of supplementing pregnant and nursing women with 4000 IU/d vitamin D3 [4]. The study was completed before the IOM report was completed and brought to the committee's attention, but was not yet published. Important findings from the study include that it took about 4000 IU/d to increase 25(OH)D concentrations to over 40 ng/ml. The study explained that at this concentration, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D concentrations reached equilibrium with 25(OH)D, and higher doses did not increase 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D concentrations much more, which alleviated many concerns about overdoses. The study found no evidence of hypercalcemia or hypercalcuria even with these large doses. Further, this higher dose generated a sufficient concentration of unconverted vitamin D3 in breast milk that the nursing infant could produce its own 25(OH)D. The effects of vitamin D during fetal development are largely mediated through 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (the active form of vitamin D) binding to vitamin D receptors, which then regulate the expression of over 200 genes, upregulating about two-thirds, downregulating one-third.

Cancer

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

        With the Japanese economy already on the brink of meltdown and the rest of the world drowning in debt, an escalation in the severity of the disaster in Japan could be the last nail in the coffin for world financial markets and economic growth.

While it has for the most part disappeared from mainstream view, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is anything but over. In fact, the situation in Japan has gone from bad to worse.

Bottom line: There is no way to contain the radiation.

Even more alarming is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other agencies have warned that the nuclear storage pools (the containment units that are being used to cool the nuclear fuel) have been damaged and may collapse under their own weight.

Such an event would cause widespread nuclear fallout throughout the region and force the government to evacuate the nearly 10 million residents of Tokyo and surrounding areas, a scenario which government emergency planners are now taking into serious consideration.

Leading Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Daily News reports:

One of the biggest issues that we face is the possibility that the spent nuclear fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will collapse. This is something that experts from both within and outside Japan have pointed out since the massive quake struck. TEPCO, meanwhile, says that the situation is under control. However, not only independent experts, but also sources within the government say that it’s a grave concern.

The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.

Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.

There was a chance early on that a storage pool collapse could be prevented, but according to the report Tokyo Electric Power Co. refused to take the necessary steps as a cost-cutting measure.

LDL cholesterol is demonized, but we’ve told you the other side of the story. Now a new discovery adds to the growing list of health benefits.

There may be a link between low levels of “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol—that is, not enough of it—and increased cancer risk, according to new research. Scientists at Tufts University looked at 201 cancer patients and 402 cancer-free patients. They found that cancer patients who never took cholesterol-lowering drugs on average had lower LDL cholesterol levels for an average of about 19 years prior to their cancer diagnosis. In other words, they were “healthier” according to the LDL demonizers in today’s medicine.

Previous studies, which looked at patients who did take cholesterol-lowering drugs, also suggested a strong link between low LDL cholesterol levels and higher cancer risk.

This finding underscores what we have said before. The “HDL cholesterol is good and LDL is bad” message being perpetrated by mainstream medicine is at the very least an oversimplification. LDL is needed by the body to build new muscle, which is important as we age. LDL can protect the brain as we age, and low levels of it can escalate problems such as dementia and memory loss. As Dr. Joseph A. Mercola points out, cholesterol is neither “good” nor “bad,” and attempts to artificially lower your cholesterol can be quite dangerous, in part because of serious side effects such as muscle damage.

So why does mainstream medicine demonize LDL cholesterol? Could it be because it benefits the billion-dollar cholesterol drug industry? Statin drugs are taken by one in four Americans over age of 45, and if patients stopped buying cholesterol drugs, Big Pharma would be in a serious financial crisis. In fact, as soon as the study’s cancer findings were published, a heart “expert” immediately warned that “statins used for LDL reduction shouldn’t be stopped if there is an appropriate use to lower heart disease risk.”

So mainstream medicine’s advice is to hang onto these “miracle drugs” even though they have been linked to nerve damage, muscle damage, liver enzyme derangement, tendon problems, anemia, acidosis, cataracts, sexual dysfunction, an increase in type 2 diabetes, and now cancer.

In the long run, statins are going to be a bonanza, but for the trial lawyers, not the drug companies. But by then it will be too late for those taking them now.

Surprise:
Antibiotics May Be Contributing to the Obesity Epidemic

Worse, their overuse may also increase our cancer risk.

We’ve been telling you about the global threat of superbugs. Much of it comes from handing out antibiotics like medicinal candy to humans or as dietary supplements to animals. Now there’s new evidence of the negative effect of antibiotics on our weight as well as a potentially devastating effect on our children’s (and children’s children’s) health.

Microbiologists at New York University have published a new study that says the overprescribing of antibiotics could be making us fat! Researchers fed infant mice low doses of penicillin; after 30 weeks, penicillin-fed mice were between 10 and 15 per cent bigger and twice as fat as drug-free mice.

This affirms research from Copenhagen which found that infants given antibiotics within the first six months of life were more likely to be overweight at age 7, even if their mother was of a healthy weight.

In the NYU study, when mice were given short courses of higher dose antibiotics—the kind that young children tend to receive for infections—their immune systems became compromised, producing significantly lower numbers of helper T-cells.