A new study out of Imperial College London suggests that fast food chains start giving out free statin drugs to customers in order to help balance out the negative effects of the junk food on their bodies. The scientists who worked on the study actually say that taking a statin drug with a fast food meal undoes most of the damage otherwise caused by eating it.

“Statins don’t cut out all of the unhealthy effects of burgers and fries. It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether. But we’ve worked out that in terms of your likelihood of having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it,” explained Dr. Darrel Francis from the National Heart and Lung Institute at the college, author of the study.

The team is suggesting that statin drugs be handed out for free — without a prescription — to fast food customers with their meals. Dr. Francis even referred to statins in an interview as “supplements” rather than drugs, comparing them to the condiments one would put on a burger and fries.

But the belief that statin drugs are no different than food or supplements and are safe to hand out to people like candy is preposterous. Not only do statin drugs deplete the body of necessary enzymes like coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) and prevent the body from producing it, but they damage cells and muscle tissue in the body.

“We know that statins cause muscle damage, but even in people without any symptoms or abnormal blood tests, muscle biopsy shows cell injury,” explains Mark Hyman, MD, in his book The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First.

Source: Natural News

Other Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea…

http://www.naturalpedia.com/statins…

What if you had perfect pitch, a photographic memory, and astounding artistic ability? Allan Snyder thinks you already do. Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney and for years he’s been studying how the mind processes information. Certain individuals, often called savants, demonstrate amazing abilities: near total recall of memories, the ability to count a large number of items simply by glancing at them (numerosity), incredible musical talent, etc. Savants display these cognitive feats while often suffering from a neural disorder like Autism
. As described in his publication in The Royal Society, Snyder believes that these abilities arise as Autism (or other phenomenon) grants the individual ‘privileged access’ to data that would normally be overridden in the brain. With magnetic pulses, Snyder has even been able to temporarily ‘unlock’ savant-like abilities in average people! There’s a chance that everyone could one day have access to this kind of hidden potential in their minds.

When it comes to “releasing the hidden potential of your mind” I’m a big skeptic. Everyone from Uri Geller to Timothy Leary has pitched that line and most of the time it’s complete bunk. So when I first saw the following infographic about Snyder’s work, I was rather dismissive. Magnets on our head could make us better artists, give us perfect pitch, and let us remember anything like Rain Man? Sure. And magic crystals will heal my damaged chakras. But then I started to look deeper into Snyder’s work and I started seeing some real science on some really interesting phenomena.

Not all savants have Autism, and not all people with Autism develop savant talents. But there’s a big correlation between the two syndromes. Other people who develop savant-like skills suffer from brain trauma, or neurologically damaging diseases. While some may dispute whether savant talents even really exist, it seems clear that there are numerous cases of people with astounding mental talents. And these talents are clustered around abnormal brain activity.

Snyder has published numerous papers on cognitive processing and brain performance. His paper in The Philisophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (biological sciences) summarizes his work (and related work from others). To grossly paraphrase his findings: the right hemisphere of the brain seems to accumulate detailed quantified data from the sensory organs unconsciously. This data is effectively overwritten or forgotten as the left brain imposes labels and organization upon it. When the left-right communication is disturbed or somehow faulty, the detailed data can sometimes be accessed by the conscious mind.

Imagine you’re a business executive. An accountant in the office is responsible for gathering lots of data. She has records of everything – lots of numbers about the money spent on pencils, the exact costs of stamps used in January, the last names of all employees in Spain, etc. The middle manager below you takes her reports and summarizes them so you can read them quickly. Less money was spent on pencils, stamp costs are stable, employees in Spain still have last names. Easy to deal with, but not very exact. What if the middle manager got sick? Well then you, the business executive would have to read those accountant’s reports yourself. You wouldn’t read that stamp costs were stable, you’d read that they were exactly $128,092.61

This is a poor analogy of what may be happening in the brain. The left hemisphere is packaging information so that you can make conscious decisions. This is generally a good thing. When you see a tiger is trying to eat you, you don’t need to worry about how many stripes it has you need to recognize it’s a tiger and run.

Occasionally though, people’s brains function differently. Snyder thinks they are granted ‘privileged access’ to the unpackaged data and gain savant-like talents. This can cause problems, such as all the negative symptoms associated with Autism, but it opens the curious possibility that this data is potentially available to everyone. Our conscious mind seems to work in a very top-down sort of way, with hierarchical thinking giving rise to the problem solving skills that make our species a success. But what if we could temporarily disturb that arrangement to regain what that structure has cost us: exact recall of detailed data and calculations.

Snyder tried to see if he could unleash that potential. Over several years, he and other researchers have used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to interfere with the neurons in the left anterior temporal lobe. The bundled the rTMS device into a hat that could be worn while patients performed different tasks. Dubbed the ‘thinking cap’ by some, it effectively shut down the left hemisphere of the brain with magnetic fields. The results are interesting. Snyder has been able to induce the ability to draw as the eye sees (even without artistic training). He’s seen improved memory, better ability to notice typos/grammar mistakes, and improved numerosity. The latter has some of the clearest results (as published in Perception, 2006). Patients shown a random number of dots on a computer screen for a brief period of time are asked to give the number of dots shown. Immediately after rTMS treatment, 10 out of 12 patients saw improvements. 8 out of these 12 saw that improvement disappear an hour after rTMS stopped. In other words, savant skills seem to appear and then slowly fade away after rTMS. A placebo treatment did not induce the same results – something is clearly going on here. … Continue Reading

CIA physicians have provided guidelines to interrogators and documented the effects of the enhanced interrogation techniques, a report says.

A demonstrator is held down during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Department in Washington on November 5, 2007.

This week, The Journal of American Medical Association published a report entitled “Roles of CIA Physicians in Enhanced Interrogation and Torture of Detainees,” which states that the CIA doctors, irrespective of medical ethical standards, performed on-site medical evaluations of detainees before and during interrogation.

The CIA Office of Medical Services said that the methods did not amount to torture, while recognizing that abusive techniques created serious medical risks.

Isolation, loud music, continuous light or darkness, extreme cold, food deprivation and waterboarding were just some of the abusive techniques to name.

In June, Physicians for Human Rights accused the Bush administration of turning the prisoners in CIA custody into research subjects.

The international non-governmental organization detailed how medical professionals conducted illegal “enhanced interrogation” techniques on the detainees and later collected data in order to study and refine the techniques.

[Via:press.tv]

WASHINGTON — A new, virulent and drug-resistant strain of E. coli bacteria is infecting people in the United States and posing a significant public health threat, doctors reported on Friday.
The new strain is called ST131 and caused many of the E. coli infections resistant to antibiotics in the fluoroquinolone and cephalosporin classes, the researchers said.

“If this strain gains one additional resistance gene, it will become almost untreatable and will be a true superbug, which is a very concerning scenario,” Dr. James Johnson of the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, who led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Johnson and colleagues said the ST131 strain has been reported in several countries and across the United States.

They tested samples from 127 patients with E. coli infections that resisted strong extended-spectrum cephalosporin and fluoroquinolone antibiotics in 2007.  Of these, genetic tests showed 54 were from the new ST131 strain.

Those samples accounted for only 17 percent of the total, but they made up 44 percent of the drug-resistant isolates. More alarming, they made up more than half of the samples resistant to two or more drugs and they accounted for nearly 70 percent of the samples resistant to fluoroquinolones or extended-spectrum cephalosporins.

Those drugs increasiningly are used as the go-to treatment for many conditions, including urinary tract infections, and in hospitalized patients.

Source: MSNBC

Editors Note: As I stated before regarding other controversial material posted on this site: DarkGovernment.com Does not necessarily agree with the views perspectives or opinions of any particular story…..OK?…..OK

By Chris Floyd

Years ago, I wrote about the use of chemical weapons in the American assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. I was attacked at the time for my “wild accusations” by many people, across the political spectrum, even by stalwart dissidents, who felt that such “exaggerations” undermined the “effectiveness” of the anti-war movement, preventing it from being taken “seriously” by the “serious” players in the power structure. Later, of course, American military officials — and serving soldiers — admitted using white phosphorus and other chemical weapons in the assault.

Over the years, small-scale medical studies have pointed to the horrific effects of these USA-WMD attacks. Now, a new comprehensive medical study has shown that the “dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukemia” in Fallujah since 2004 have “exceeded those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,” The Independent reports.

The Independent story follows up on an initial video report by top BBC journalist John Simpson last week — a story that was almost universally ignored, not only in the fawning corporate press but also across the “dissident” blogosphere (except by a very few, such as Winter Patriot).  Both stories make clear that the chief victims of the American WMD are, overwhelming, children:

dead and wounded americans on the outskirts of fallujah

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened”.

US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.

The background here is good as far as it goes, but it omits the salient point of that mutilation of American mercenaries; it followed a series of security shoot-em-ups that killed a number of innocent civilians in Fallujah. The attacks on the Blackwater mercenaries were a violent reprisal for murders committed by foreign agents in the midst of an illegal act of military aggression. But, as always, the American revenge for the attacks was vastly disproportionate: an entire city destroyed, thousands of people killed — and generations of terrible suffering for innocent children — all to get “payback” for four mercenaries.

The Independent continues:

In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. “During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city,” recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad. … Continue Reading