The BP spill in the Gulf: One year later

(NaturalNews.com) – It’s been called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and rightfully so, if for no other reason than because, one year later, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is like the nightmare gift that keeps on giving, some experts are saying. The Deepwater Horizon exploration platform, which was drilling in the BP-operated Macando Prospect 40-odd miles off the coast of Louisiana, exploded in a ball of flame April 20, 2010. The explosion killed 11 people, injured 17 others and fractured the extraction pipe, gushing an estimated 200 million gallons of oil over the next 95 days in a region that has been called one of the most important ecosystems in all of North America. The well was finally capped on July 17. The relief well process was completed on Sept. 19, and the federal government officially declared the well “dead.” The spill caused an immediate impact on Gulf-related industry, as well as leveling severe damage to marine and wildlife habitats all up down the Gulf Coast. The spill impacted as much as 320 miles of Louisiana coastline at its peak. After being closed throughout much of the summer, the shrimping industry was suspended once again in November in about 4,200 square miles of Gulf when tar balls were discovered in shrimp nets. In January Frances Beinecke , appointed to a special commission to examine the causes of the disaster and make recommendations to prevent future accidents, said “tar balls were continuing to wash up on shore, and that oil sheen trails were being seen in the wake of fishing boats. Wetlands and marshlands were still in decline and dying; crude oil lay offshore in deep water, as well as fine silts and sands onshore.” Though skimmer ships, floating containment booms, dispersants and other measures were employed to sop up the oil and prevent the bulk of it from reaching shore, oil still found its way there, and in great amounts. More of it, in fact, that many experts believe BP was willing to admit. The Obama administration pointed the finger of blame squarely at BP , even holding the oil giant responsible for picking up the tab for deploying the National Guard in support of recovery efforts. The company, for its part, set up a $20 billion compensation fund, having approved more than 300,000 claims and paying out $3.8 billion by the spill’s anniversary date. But the jury is still out on the spill’s final costs and damage estimates. In all, according to RestoreTheGulf.gov , a Web site established by the government to track progress in cleaning up the spill, 800,000-plus barrels of oily water were recovered and nearly 1.8 million gallons if dispersant was deployed in an attempt to clear the Gulf. How have the efforts faired? You will get different responses to that question. On the one hand, one report said this week , there are some good signs. Scientists found thriving schools of fish when they attempted late last year to gauge the effects of the spill. “Trawling surveys done in the fall of 2010 caught triple the number of marine creatures as prior years,” said a report in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. “With no one netting them, it seemed, the fish were surging.” But that bit of good news comes with caveats. For example, Blair Mase, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine mammal stranding coordinator, says deaths of dolphins in the region this year is exceptionally high , and that the spill could be playing a major role. “We’re trying to determine what’s causing this. It could be infectious related. Or it could be non-infection,” she said, noting that her agency was examining a number of causes, including the spill, infectious disease and biotoxins. In addition, some of the region’s best sporting fish and species of seafood are turning up with heinous-looking, uncharacteristic lesions. Perhaps more telling, scientists say there is a hefty amount of oil left – perhaps even more than what spilled during the Exxon-Valdez disaster off the coast of Alaska in 1989 (about 257,000 barrels of oil). There are also reports that the spill is having effects on Gulf Coast residents as well. Darryl Malek-Wiley, environmental justice organizer with Sierra Club, said in an interview this week that the combination of oil and the dispersants used to clean it up are taking their toll. “Some of the people who are sick, they’re taking samples of their blood and they’re finding the chemicals that make up the dispersants in their blood, as well as Louisiana sweet crude, and having serious health impacts,” he said. “Loss of memory, rashes, sinus. Some folks we’ve talked with, they forget where they’re going. They forget who you are. And these are men, all of them were fishermen in relatively good physical shape.” As for the seafood industry, the government says its tests have not turned up any safety concerns, noting that samples of swordfish, tuna and other fin fish have found “no detectable oil or dispersant odors or flavors,” according to the Globe and Mail. But perhaps more telling is that a number of experts don’t believe the spill has led to any meaningful reform. “The BP oil spill is, potentially, a ‘cultural anomaly’ for institutional changes in environmental management and fossil fuel production,” a study by P. Devereaux Jennings of the Alberta university and Andrew Hoffman of the University of Michigan concluded. They added that a “true change in our approach to handling issues related to oil drilling, oil consumption and environmental management have yet to occur.” Adds Beinecke: “Today Americans have the right to ask: are we any safer than we were last April? At the broadest level, the answer is no.”

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Sugar-sweetened drinks cause higher blood pressure

(NaturalNews) New research just published in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association concludes that soda and other drinks sweetened with sugar are associated with higher blood pressure. And the more sugar as well as sodium (also found in abundance in most sodas) people consumed, the higher blood pressure spiked upwards. The International Study of Macro/Micronutrients and Blood Pressure (dubbed INTERMAP, for short), found that research subjects who drank sugar-sweetened beverages daily had significantly higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure on average than folks who didn’t imbibe the sweet drinks. Researchers found the highest blood pressure levels in people who consumed the most glucose and fructose — both of these sweeteners are found in high-fructose corn syrup, which is the most common sugar sweetener used by the beverage industry. INTERMAP investigators looked at the consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks, sugars and diet beverages in 2,696 participants between the ages of 40 and 59 who lived in two areas of the United Kingdom and eight regions of the U.S. In detailed interviews, the research subjects revealed what they ate and drank for four days. They also underwent two 24-hour urine collections and eight blood pressure readings and filled out detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle, medical history and social factors. The research team found that sugar intake (in the form of glucose, fructose and sucrose) was highest in people who drank more than one sugar-sweetened drink a day. In addition, they discovered that individuals drinking more than one serving per day of sugar-sweetened beverages consumed almost 400 calories more daily than people who didn’t. Overall, the scientists concluded that folks who drink a lot of sugar-sweetened beverages have less healthy diets than those who avoid imbibing these empty calories. “They consume less potassium, magnesium and calcium,” Ian Brown, Ph.D., research associate at Imperial College London, said in a press statement. “One possible mechanism for sugar-sweetened beverages and fructose increasing blood pressure levels is a resultant increase in the level of uric acid in the blood that may in turn lower the nitric oxide required to keep the blood vessels dilated. Sugar consumption also has been linked to enhanced sympathetic nervous system activity and sodium retention,” he added. Paul Elliott, Ph.D., senior author of the study and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, stated the new research points to a possible intervention to lower blood pressure. “These findings lend support for recommendations to reduce the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, as well as added sugars and sodium in an effort to reduce blood pressure and improve cardiovascular health,” he noted. So do these findings give a green light to drinking chemically sweetened sodas instead of the ones containing sugar? Hardly. As NaturalNews as reported previously, there’s extensive evidence linking artificial sweeteners like aspartame to health problems ranging from premature births and brain tumors to fatty liver disease (http://www.naturalnews.com/aspartame.html). What’s more, although the INTERMAP study found no consistent link between blood pressure levels and drinking diet sodas, the researchers did discover that those who drank diet soda had higher mean Body Mass Indexes (BMI) than those who didn’t — and they exercised less, too. That means the people drinking diet sodas were fatter and probably less fit than the sugar-beverage consumers. For more information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21357284

Antioxidants in pecans may contribute to heart health and disease prevention

New research shows that after eating pecans, gamma-tocopherol levels in the body doubled and unhealthy oxidation of LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood decreased by as much as 33 percent.

How a Blood glucose Meter Works?

A blood glucose meter is a device used for medical reasons that helps in determining the glucose content material in the blood. This device is mostly utilized by people affected by diabetes and hypoglycaemia. The method of monitoring the glucose content material in the blood is completed by pricking the skin to acquire a minute [...]

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Statin drugs are over prescribed in healthy people who have no evidence of heart disease

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine has been calling for more and more people to be placed on “miracle” drugs known as statins that lower cholesterol. There have even been suggestions that statins should be sold over the counter or given out free when people buy junk, fat-loaded fast food (http://www.naturalnews.com/029467_statin_drugs_fast_food.html). After all, the rationale goes, by lowering cholesterol, arteries won’t clog and heart attacks and strokes can be prevented. However, there have long been two obvious flaws in that theory. For starters, high cholesterol along with most other cardiovascular risk factors can be lowered in most people naturally by lifestyle changes such as exercise, a healthy diet and keeping weight under control. Secondly, statins come with a host of dangerous and even deadly side effects, including liver damage, impaired brain function (http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html), sometimes irreversible muscle damage and eye disorders (http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html). And now there’s a third reason not to jump on Big Pharma’s money making band wagon known as statin therapy. Johns Hopkins research just presented November 16th at the American Heart Association’s (AHA) annual Scientific Sessions in Chicago, gives clear evidence these drugs are over-prescribed. In fact, pushing these drugs as “preventive therapy” for future heart attacks in healthy men and women who don’t already have artery clogging calcium deposits is just plain bad medicine. The new findings are from the Johns Hopkins-led Multi-Ethnic Study on Atherosclerosis, or MESA. The research was designed to be the first to pinpoint exactly who among the more than 6 million healthy American adults with normal blood cholesterol levels should be candidates for so-called preventive statin therapy. According to results of the JUPITER trial (short for the Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: An Interventional Tool Evaluating Rosuvastin) published in 2008, the statin drug rosuvastatin (sold and widely advertised on television as Crestor), was effective in preventing heart attack and stroke in some individuals, all of whom had high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP). But when the Johns Hopkins team checked these findings with a new investigation — they came up with a dramatically different conclusion. They selected MESA study participants, who met the same criteria used for the JUPITER study, from a pool of 7,000 ethnically diverse adults, including African Americans, Chinese Americans, Caucasians and Hispanics. All the 950 volunteers were monitored at Johns Hopkins and five other medical centers in North America. The results showed that only the people with measurable buildup of artery-hardening calcium in their blood vessels had a high rate of heart emergencies over the course of the six year study. But almost half of the study participants had no detectable levels of calcium in their blood vessels and those people had a very low rate (about 5 percent ) of heart-disease related events — meaning that taking daily statin drugs as a “preventive measure” wouldn’t have offered any coronary protection. But taking the drugs would have exposed them to potentially serious side effects. So, despite all the cholesterol measuring near-hysteria of past decades, the Johns Hopkins researchers are now calling for an emphasis on measuring coronary artery calcium deposits to find out who is really at risk of suffering a heart attack “It certainly is not the case that all adults should be taking it (statin therapy) to prevent heart attack and stroke, because half are at negligible risk of a sudden coronary event in the next five to 10 years,” lead investigator Michael Blaha, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart and Vascular Institute, said in a media statement. And remember all the media hype claiming that high levels of CRP in the blood are predictive of a future heart attack? Participants in the Johns Hopkins study were found to have varying blood levels of the inflammatory byproduct, which has been called a predictor of all kinds of coronary disease. But it turns out, according to the new research, that’s not true either. In fact, an elevated CRP score at or above 2 milligrams per liter offered no predictive value after established risk factors were taken into account, including age, gender, ethnicity, hypertension, blood cholesterol levels, obesity, diabetes, smoking and a family history of heart disease. Bottom line: the new statistical comparison of results showed that few if any heart attacks or strokes would have been prevented within five years had anyone in the study taken statin drugs, unless there was already some calcium buildup in their blood vessels. But even in people with moderate calcium buildup, only one heart attack would have been averted in every 94 people treated, and one stroke in every 54. “Statin therapy should not be approached like diet and exercise as a broadly based solution for preventing coronary heart disease. These are lifelong medications with potential, although rare side effects, and physicians should only consider their use for those patients at greatest risk, especially those with high coronary calcium scores,” study co-investigator and cardiologist Roger Blumenthal, M.D., a professor and director of the Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center at Johns Hopkins, emphasized in a press statement. He also pointed out that as many as 5 percent of people on statins develop serious side effects, such as muscle pain. In addition, one in 255 will develop diabetes because of the drugs. Be sure to watch the Health Ranger’s new comedy animation on statin drugs at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=2D691570EF29BA0517C767D6ED6667C0 For additional information: http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/heart_vascular_institute/clinical_trials/preventive/mesa.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_09c_04.html

Daily dose of beet juice promotes brain health in older adults

(NaturalNews) The memory and mind-destroying disease known as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are often seen as terrifying consequences of aging that strike out of the blue — and supposedly little can be done to prevent or treat these horrible conditions. But while Big Pharma has consistently failed to come up with drugs that halt or reverse cognitive decline, at least for long, research into natural therapies continues to provide tangible evidence that much can be done to fight dementia using exercise, diet and supplements. For example, vitamin D deficiencies have been linked to declining mental abilities (http://www.naturalnews.com/025807_Vitamin_D_deficiency.html) and researchers have also found that ancient meditation and exercise techniques, including qigong and Tai Chi, slow physical, mental and psychological decline in people with dementia (http://www.naturalnews.com/025040_Alzheimers_dementia_research.html). And now, for the first time, scientists have discovered that drinking beet juice can increase blood flow to the brain in older adults and may combat the progression of Alzheimer’s and related conditions. For the new study, which is slated for publication in Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry , the peer-reviewed journal of the Nitric Oxide Society, scientists at Wake Forest University’s Translational Science Center looked at how dietary nitrates affected 14 adults age 70 and older over a period of four days. High concentrations of nitrates are found in beets and other foods including celery, cabbage, spinach and some kinds of lettuce. When a person eats high nitrate foods, the beneficial “good” bacteria in the mouth transform the nitrates into nitrites. And researchers have found that nitrites then naturally open up the blood vessels in the body. This increases blood flow and helps oxygen get specifically to places in body that are lacking oxygen. “There have been several very high-profile studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, but we wanted to show that drinking beet juice also increases perfusion, or blood flow, to the brain,” Daniel Kim-Shapiro, director of the Translational Science Center, said in a press statement. “There are areas in the brain that become poorly perfused as you age, and that’s believed to be associated with dementia and poor cognition.” On the first day, the research volunteers reported to the lab after a 10 hour fast, completed a health status report, and then drank either a high or low nitrate breakfast. The high nitrate breakfast included 16 ounces of beet juice. Then the study participants went home with lunch, dinner and snacks conforming to their specifically assigned diets. The following day, after another 10 hour fast, the volunteers went back to the lab where they ate their assigned breakfasts. Blood samples were taken before and after breakfast to measure nitrite levels in their bodies. Then, one hour after eating, an MRI was performed to record the blood flow in each individual subject’s brain. On the third and fourth days of the study, the scientists switched the diets and repeated the process for each subject. The results of the MRIs showed conclusively that after the older adults ate a high nitrate diet, they experienced increased blood flow to the white matter of the frontal lobes — the very area of the brain commonly associated with degeneration linked to dementia and other cognitive conditions. “I think these results are consistent and encouraging — that good diet consisting of a lot of fruits and vegetables can contribute to overall good health,” Gary Miller, associate professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science and one of the senior investigators on the project, said in a press statement. For more information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20951824 http://www.naturalnews.com/beets.html http://www.healingfoodreference.com/beets.html http://www.naturalnews.com/dementia.html

Insufficient vitamin D levels in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients linked to cancer progression and death

Researchers have found a significant difference in cancer progression and death in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients who had sufficient vitamin D levels in their blood compared to those who didn’t.

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