Action Alert: Is the Institute of Medicine in Bed with Big Pharma?

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) new and absurdly low vitamin D recommendation flies in the face of scientific evidence. Now we need your help to get Congress to launch an investigation. Some may ask, “Why are you treating this report as such a big deal? I’ll take however many vitamins I wish, and the government has no say in the matter.” But unless these findings are challenged, the public will accept it as true. Doctors, medical institutions, the media, and governmental agencies will all parrot these ultra-low recommendations on vitamin D dosage, pooh-poohing its important therapeutic benefits, and keeping the American public dangerously deficient in the vitamin. This will mean more colds, more flu, greater dependence on dangerous flu shots and antibiotics, more illness in general, more weak bones, more cancer, and many more deaths. Some experts calculate [2] that proper vitamin D supplementation could save Americans $4.4 trillion over a decade—about $1,346 per person every year.

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'Greener' Climate Prediction Shows Plants Slow Warming

A new NASA modeling effort found that in a doubled-carbon dioxide world plant growth could lessen global warming by about 0.3 degrees C globally. The same model found that the world would warm by 1.94 degrees C without this cooling feedback factored in. Image: Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Credit: National Park Service)

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Who’s Trying to Scuttle the Amendment that Protected Organic and Family Farms? Big Food on the Attack!

tractorToday we reveal the thirty agribusiness front groups and industrial agriculture lobbyists that continue to fight the Tester amendment. One of the few saving graces of the Senate’s controversial FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510)—which passed the Senate last week, only to be sidelined for the moment by a constitutional error—was the amendment introduced by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT). Small-farm and organic food advocates warned that the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork; the Tester amendment exempted producers with less than $500,000 a year in sales who sell most of their food locally. ANH-USA and other organizations successfully fought [1] to get the amendment included in the final Senate bill.

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Vitamin Supplements Reduce Deaths Caused by Measles and Diarrhea, Study Finds

Vitamin A supplements are still an effective way to reduce childhood death and disease. A new study by Cochrane researchers strongly endorses the continuation of vitamin A supplementation programs, which reduce the incidence of measles and diarrhea and ultimately save lives.

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Bodhi Day - Celebrating the Buddha's Enlightenment

Today, all over the world, Zen Buddhists are celebrating the day of the Buddha's enlightenment. Known in Japan as "Rohatsu" (literally, the 8th day of 12th month) this Bodhi Day marks the defining event in the legend of Shakyamuni Buddha: his enlightenment experience.

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David Katz: How The Environment Affects Your Health

It has been a banner week for biomedical news. The Institute of Medicine released a provocative and somewhat controversial report on calcium and vitamin D intake; the American Cancer Society announced results of an enormous study reaffirming the link between body mass index and mortality; there was at least aleatory passage of a historic food safety bill in Congress; and a long awaited update to federal policy governing child nutrition was passed and awaits the President's signature.

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Robert Scheer: From Jefferson to Assange

All you need to know about Julian Assange’s value as a crusading journalist is that The New York Times and most of the world’s other leading newspapers have led daily with important news stories based on his WikiLeaks releases. All you need to know about the collapse of traditional support for the constitutional protection of a free press is that Dianne Feinstein, the centrist Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called for Assange “to be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.”

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Raven Clabough: U.S. Military Prepares for Economic Collapse

Skeptics who continue to assert that the economic plight of the United States has been overstated need not look further than the Pentagon to find out just how wrong they are. CNBC has learned that the Pentagon is currently playing out “war games” pertinent to an American economic meltdown.

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AIDS INC.: Observations of an AIDS Dissident

At least once a week I announce to whomever will listen that I am retiring from AIDS journalism. That the whole business makes my head hurt, my eyes bug out, my stomach churn and my nostrils flare unattractively with repressed rage. The very idea that there must be an objective reality to AIDS and what causes it -- a set of facts, a bottom line, seems too much to ask, in fact, seems beside the point. AIDS is a political movement. and as Milan Kundera once wrote: "...political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitch."

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What is the Evidence for the Existence of HIV?

Does the currently available evidence prove beyond reasonable doubt that a unique, exogenously acquired retrovirus has been isolated from the tissues of AIDS patients? Perhaps. Perhaps not. This is what I invite you to judge. And in case you are inclined to be assaulted by the opinions of overwhelming majorities, you may take comfort from a most venerated, international scientist who said, "In Science the authority embodied in the opinion of thousands is not worth a spark of reason in one man." I shall reward you with his identity at the end of this talk.

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