August 15, 2008

Contents:

1. Endangered Natural Health Products? Google Video
2. Montreal Gazette's Scaremongering About Vitamins
3. New Video: Vyvyan Howard's Toronto Presentation on Fluoride (August 2008)
4. Essential vs Fragrance Oils: The Hazards of Scents

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Endangered Natural Health Products? Google Video

If you couldn't attend the "Endangered Natural Health Products?" event on June 2nd, 2008, in Vancouver, with keynote speaker Shawn Buckley, LLB, you can now watch it on Google Video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=836051413688...

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Montreal Gazette's Scaremongering About Vitamins

by Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, August 4, 2008

"Can a vitamin kill you?" asks the Montreal Gazette.

According to Evra Taylor Levy and Eddy Lang's article (May 12, 2008), vitamins are murderous little molecules. "Stop taking supplements of vitamins A, E and beta-carotene, plain and simple," they say. Quoting an interpretation of data by researchers with the Cochrane collaboration (1), they would have you believe that vitamins are somehow harmful, and quite possibly deadly.

So where are the bodies? The authors? single, much quoted, much-touted "study" was merely a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is not a clinical study, but rather a statistical look at a collection of studies. The key to "convenient" statistics is exactly which studies you choose to look at . . . or refuse to look at. If you analyze enough failed studies, you will get a negative meta-analysis. It's a no-brainer. If you exclude enough successful studies, you preordain the conclusion. When you select a mere 67 studies, out of thousands and thousands of existing, positive vitamin supplements studies, something is wrong. Yet that is exactly what the Cochrane review did.

A very large amount of research showing that vitamins are safe and effective was systematically excluded. For example, the study authors never even looked at over 600 scientific studies and papers from the Toronto-based Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal that specifically publishes vitamin therapy research, and has done so for over forty years. They also failed to consider the wealth of reports by experienced doctors, such as distinguished Vancouver physician Abram Hoffer, MD. Dr. Hoffer, who also has a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, said, "Vitamin supplements are extraordinarily safe and effective. This is based on fifty years of clinical experience without seeing any life-threatening side effects and no deaths. It is pharmaceutical drugs that are dangerous. Perhaps the drug industry is getting tired of all the bad news about drugs, so instead they are going after nutritional supplements."

Another British Columbia physician, Erik Paterson, MD, said: "For 33 years I have aggressively prescribed and advocated vitamins in doses vastly higher than the usual government recommendations for my family and my patients. I have never seen any adverse reactions, even though I have been on the alert for them all this time."

71% of Canadians use natural health products. If they are so dangerous, where are all the bodies? Perhaps there aren't any simply because vitamin supplements are indeed safe. Health Canada, under the 2004 Natural Health Products Regulations (4), requires that vitamins and other supplements "must be safe for consideration as over-the-counter products. . . Health Canada ensures that all Canadians have ready access to natural health products that are safe, effective and of high quality." (2)

A 23-year review of US poison control center annual reports (3) confirms the true and largely ignored story: vitamins are extraordinarily safe. The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC), which maintains the USA?s national database of information from 61 poison control centers, provides data showing that even including intentional and accidental misuse, the number of alleged vitamin fatalities is strikingly low, averaging less than one death per year for more than two decades. In 16 of those 23 years, AAPCC reports that there was not one single death due to vitamins. (3) These statistics specifically include vitamin A, niacin (B-3), pyridoxine (B-6), other B-complex, C, D, E, and "other" vitamin(s), such as vitamin K. Michael Janson, MD, said, "In decades of people taking a wide variety of dietary supplements, few adverse effects have been noted, and zero deaths as a result of the dietary supplements. There is far more risk to public health from people stopping their vitamin supplements than from people taking them."

Supplements are an easy, practical entry-level better-nutrition solution for the public, who are more likely to take convenient vitamin tablets than to willingly eat organ meats, wheat germ, and ample vegetables. Scare-stories notwithstanding, taking supplements is not the problem; it is a solution. Malnutrition is the problem.

It is indeed curious that, while theorizing many "potential" dangers of vitamins, critics fail to point out how economical supplements are. The uncomfortable truth is that it is often less expensive to supplement than to buy nutritious food, especially out-of-season fresh produce. For low-income households, taking vitamin supplements, readily obtainable from any discount store, is vastly cheaper than getting those vitamins by eating right.

The Gazette should know better. Public supplementation should be encouraged, not discouraged. Vitamin supplements have been repeatedly proven to be a cost-effective means of preventing and ameliorating illness.

Where are the bodies? There aren't any. There is not one death per year from any vitamin in the alphabet. Not from A, Bs, C, D or E. Vitamin safety has been, and remains, extraordinarily high.

References:
(1) Bjelakovic G et al: Antioxidant supplements for prevention of mortality in healthy participants and patients with various diseases. Cochrane Database Systematic Reviews. 2008 April 16; (2):CD007176.

(2) http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/prodnatur/index-eng.p...

(3) Annual Reports of the American Association of Poison Control Centers' National Poisoning and Exposure Database (formerly known as the Toxic Exposure Surveillance System). AAPCC, 3201 New Mexico Avenue, Ste. 330, Washington, DC 20016.

(4) http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/prodnatur/legislation...
Download any report from1983-2006 at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/NPDS/AnnualReports/tabid/12... free of charge. The "Vitamin" category is usually near the end of the report.

For additional information:
Evidence of Vitamin Safety: Testimony to Canadian Parliament http://www.doctoryourself.com/testimony.htm
Vitamin Safety and Effectiveness http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml...
Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine free archive of papers, 1967-2007 http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/index.shtml

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org
The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource.

To Subscribe at no charge: http://www.orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html

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New Video: Vyvyan Howard's Toronto Presentation on Fluoride (August 2008)

by Paul Connett, FLUORIDE ACTION NETWORK

August 17, 2008

I am happy to tell you that an edited version of Dr. Howard's August 11, 2008, Toronto presentation "Fluoride and the Developing Nervous System" is now available on Google video. This 30-minute tape can be accessed at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=407241655905...

One small historical correction. Dr. Howard refers to a 1984 WHO report which used a paper by Murray and Rugg-Gunn (1982) which cited 120 papers which supposedly supported the effectiveness of fluoridation for fighting tooth decay. In this connection he cited Dr. Philip Sutton's devastating critique of this paper which had been used to underpin WHO's updated endorsement of fluoridation. The correct date of Sutton's critique was 1989 (submitted in a letter to the Chemical and Engineering News) not 1959. WHO had first officially endorsed fluoridation in 1969 and the somewhat dubious process by which this occurred is documented in Waldbott et al's  book "Fluoridation the Great Dilemma" pp 283-5.

The evidence that fluoride lowers IQ is stronger than we thought.

In Dr. Howard's presentation he used a systematic review of all the studies that have suggested that fluoride lowers IQ in children. 18 our of 20 studies have found this association. This review, authored by Michael Connett and Hardy Limeback, was presented at the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) in Toronto earlier this year. We have just found out that ANOTHER systematic review of this literature has been carried out by Chinese reviewers (Tang et al.). Their review appeared in the journal Biology of Trace Element Research and the abstract of the paper available is printed below. The authors, who only reviewed Chinese studies, concluded that "children who live in a fluorosis area have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area."

This review paper underlines the importance of FAN's work not only in trying to end fluoridation worldwide by education and organization but also by making scientific research more available to both the public and the scientific community. It was FAN that had 19 Chinese studies on the brain translated into English. It was these studies which not only formed a large basis of the Connett/Limeback meta-analysis, but in addition, 12 of these English translations, were featured in a recent issue of the journal Fluoride. It is interesting that the Chinese authors of this second Meta-analysis cite the website of the journal fluoride (www.fluorideresearch.org) in their abstract below. It is thus conceivable that in addition to most of the western scientific community being unaware of these important Chinese studies, that some Chinese researchers may have been unaware of how extensively their own scientists have studied this issue.

A preliminary review of the 16 studies reviewed by the Chinese researchers (they did not review the recent papers from India, Mexico and Iran) indicates that there are some more studies from China of which we had been unaware. So there now appear to be over 20 studies which are associating a decrease in IQ with over-exposure to fluoride. With dental fluorosis now impacting 32% of American children (a clear indicator of over-exposure to fluoride before the permanent teeth have erupted) this should be a matter of grave concern for all those countries which practice water fluoridation.

Doubtless, diehard fluoridation promoters will claim that the exposures in these studies is "much higher" than exposures in fluoridated countries. However, such a rationale for dismissing their relevance is neither scientific nor responsible. Most of these studies were conducted on relatively small populations and to protect the whole population of children - with a large range of sensitivity due to different body weights, different diets (including the all-important iodine intake), different health status and kidney function -drinking uncontrolled amounts of water, juices and soft drinks (made using fluoridated water) as well as fluoride from many other sources - one needs to apply at least a margin of safety of 10 to be protective. The Xiang (2003) study estimated that IQ would be lowered at 1.8 ppm. There is simply NOT an adequate margin of safety to protect our whole population from fluoride's potential to interfere with developing brain, when consuming water at about 1 ppm, especially babies.

Nature gave its own verdict on this matter when it set the level of fluoride in mothers milk at 0.004 ppm (NRC, 2006, table 2-6), some 250 times lower than 1 ppm.

We have to get this message out to the more responsible and less brain-washed members of the medical community. This is what our Triple event in Toronto set out to do. In this Dr. Vyvyan Howard played a truly magnificent role.

Paul Connett

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Biol Trace Elem Res. (abstract distributed on PubMed, August, 2008)

Fluoride and Children's Intelligence: A Meta-analysis.

Tang QQ,, Du J,  Ma HH , Jiang SJ,, Zhou XJ
Department of Pathology, Nanjing University School of Medicine, Nanjing Jinling Hospital, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210002, People's Republic of China.

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature concerning fluoride that was carried out to investigate whether fluoride exposure increases the risk of low intelligence quotient (IQ) in China over the past 20 years. MEDLINE, SCI, and CNKI search were organized for all documents published, in English and Chinese, between 1988 and 2008 using the following keywords: fluorosis, fluoride, intelligence, and IQ. Further search was undertaken in the website www.fluorideresearch.org because this is a professional website concerning research on fluoride. Sixteen case-control studies that assessed the development of low IQ in children who had been exposed to fluoride earlier in their life were included in this review. A qualitative review of the studies found a consistent and strong association between the exposure to fluoride and low IQ. The meta-analyses of the case-control studies estimated that the odds ratio of IQ in endemic fluoride areas compared with nonfluoride areas or slight fluoride areas. The summarized weighted mean difference is -4.97 (95%confidence interval [CI] = -5.58 to -4.36; p < 0.01) using a fixed-effect model and -5.03 (95%CI = -6.51 to 3.55; p < 0.01) using a random-effect model, which means that children who live in a fluorosis area have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18695947?dopt=Abs...

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Essential vs Fragrance Oils: The Hazards of Scents

by Klaus Ferlow

What is a fragrance oil? Fragrance oils are combinations of synthetically manufactured chemicals designed to "mimic" the aroma of natural materials. Far from "natural", 95% of the chemicals found in these oils are synthetic compounds derived from petroleum, and include chemicals such as benzene derivatives, aldehydes, and others capable causing cancer, birth defects, central nervous system disorders (CNS) and allergic reactions. Today, fragrances are marketed to an unsuspecting public who think that these scents are natural. Even unscented and fragrance-free products can contain masking scents to mask the smell of other ingredients.

Despite the widespread and constant exposure to fragrance chemicals in thousands of products, there is minimal government regulation and monitoring on their safety. With 1,000 new synthetic chemicals added yearly to the already 80,000 to 100,000 in use today, most of which have not be tested individually or in combination for their effects on human health, it's not surprising that one in five people experience health problems when exposed. Fragrance chemicals do not have to be listed on the product label. Trade secret laws keep toxicity testing and ingredient identification from being accurately disclosed, in an industry which is largely self-regulating!

Hormone-disrupting effects
A study by Greenpeace in 2005, discovered that 36 well-known perfume brands contained two toxic, man-made chemicals, phthalate esters and synthetic musk, as in the "old" days the perfumes were derived 100% from botanical plants.  Phthalates are known estrogen and testosterone hormone disrupters and effect DNA, male sperm and restricts lung function in men, while synthetic musk can attack living tissues. Phthalates have been associated with thyroid disorders, premature breast development in baby girls, and abnormal sexual development in male fetus and infants. They are also found in the blood of pregnant women, in breast milk, and can cross the placenta. Diethyl phthalate, commonly used in fragrances and other personal care products, damages the DNA of sperm which can lead to infertility in adult men. Phthalates can change peoples mood and behaviour, and as they can disguise unpleasant odours, are often found in cleaning products, in hospitals (seems today one of the most dangerous place on earth) and nursing homes.

Some fragrance chemicals can alter the skin's surface tension, facilitating the absorption of other chemicals into the skin. Fragrances can lead to allergies, eczema, psoriasis, contact dermatitis and other skin conditions. It is estimated that 1 to 2% of the North America population may have a skin allergy to fragrances as these can easily volatilize. And, as manufacturers use long lasting fragrance chemicals and invent new powerful potent ones, they can linger in the air, settling and sticking to skin, hair, clothes, furnishings, everything!

Fragranced laundry products provide constant exposure, infants' skin being especially susceptible to absorbing chemicals directly from diapers. Fragrance chemicals can also accumulate in fabrics and are very difficult to remove. Laundry will even absorb fragrances if other people have used fragrance detergents in their wash.

Neurological effects
Fragrance chemicals affect brain and the central nervous system, with some effects being immediate and transistory, while others are chronic and long lasting. Fragrances can modify brain blood flow, alter blood pressure, pulse and mood, and trigger migraine headaches. When inhaled, some have potent sedative effects and some like AETT and musk ambrette are neurotoxic. Specially formulated fragrances are used to control public behaviour.

Respiratory effects
Fragrance chemicals can induce or worsen respiratory problems, and lower airway irritation occurs in 15% of people. These respiratory irritants, which cause inflammation and increase mucus production, make the airways more susceptible to injury and allergens, as well as trigger and exacerbate such conditions as asthma, allergies, sinus problems and other respiratory disorders. In school aged children, fragrances can trigger asthma, a chronic illness afflicting nine million American children. Among adults, asthma rates have doubled since 1980, with one in fourteen suffers from asthma, and with 72% of asthmatics citing fragrance as a trigger.

Environmental effects
Fragrances are volatile compounds. The widespread use (and they are banned already in some clinics, hospitals and other public buildings) and vast numbers of fragranced products used cause extensive indoor and outdoor pollution. Many people find it difficult to enter public buildings, attend public events, stand near people or walk outdoors due to fragrances released in the air. A Norwegian study even found synthetic musk compounds in outdoor air in a remote area.

Fragrances are dispensed through ventilation systems in many buildings. They are designed to add a "pleasant" scent to the air (for example, using food smells in shopping malls and floral scents in stores to increase sales). Scents can cover up poor air quality due to odours from cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, pesticides, mould and chemical off-gassing from furniture, carpet, glues, cleaning products, etc. They can also cover up insufficient fresh air ventilation present in many offices, restaurants, hotels, airports etc.

An estimated 292 million Americans regularly wash and dry their clothes using fragranced laundry products!

Waste water treatment facilities do not remove fragrance chemicals, many of which are persistent and accumulate in the environment. The documented presence of fragrance chemicals in even drinking water, in streams and in lakes could adversely affect the health of people, animal and plant life. For more information on the hazards of synthetic scents, refer to: www.ourlittleplace.com/perfume.html, www.herc.org/news/perfume/risks.htm

A variety of fragrance-free natural products are available in the marketplace, just make the effort and carefully read all the labels. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, don't buy it!

Klaus Ferlow, traditional herbalist, innovator, lecturer, writer, founder, President and co-owner of FERLOW BOTANICALS, Div. of Ferlow Brothers Ltd, Vancouver, BC. Manufacturing/distributing organic toxin-free herbal medicinal and personal care products to professional health & wellness practitioners and selected stores with holistic practitioners on staff in Canada and parts of USA since 1993.  www.ferlowbotanicals.com

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