Vaccine Awareness Week: Fighting the Vaccine Culture War and Opposing Mandatory Vaccines

This week from November 5-11, 2017 Mercola.com and the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) are co-sponsoring the Eighth Annual Vaccine Awareness Week (VAW), a week dedicated to raising awareness about vaccines and informed consent rights. With all the uncertainty surrounding the risks and failures of vaccines, it's critical to protect your legal right to make independent health choices and exercise voluntary informed consent to vaccination. It is urgent that everyone stand up and fight to protect flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions and expand informed consent protections in state public health and employment laws. During this week, Dr. Joseph Mercola will double match your donations up to $100,000 to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit charity advocating for vaccine safety and protection of the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking, including vaccine risk taking. NVIC's mission since 1982 has been to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and to defend your legal right to exercise informed consent to vaccination.

Power Up With Beets

A new study has emerged that may give hope to those who may see themselves as the proverbial “90-pound weakling.” Surprisingly, the remedy can be found in the garden. The study, recently conducted at the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, is one of several university trials revealing that a small amount of beet juice is all it takes to beef up your exercise performance and endurance. The researchers found nine heart failure subjects who experienced the typical symptoms — loss of skeletal muscle strength, reduced ability to exercise and even evidence that quality of life was suffering. Each individual exhibited measurable improvement. The patients were given 140 milliliters — about two-thirds of a cup — of concentrated beet juice, followed by testing, which found an almost instantaneous increase in their muscle capacity by an average of 13 percent. The study was published in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure in September 2015. One of the study’s coauthors, Andrew Coggan, assistant professor of radiology at the university, asserted that’s the type of boost one might get after a few hard months of resistance training. The source of this impressive difference, studies revealed, came from nitric oxide. One of the most important benefits beet juice offers the heart is that its compounds “de-stiffen” patients’ blood vessels when the individual is at rest. This prevents the heart from having to work so hard and also demonstrates potential value to diabetics. Interestingly, it’s occurred to more than a few scientists that a similar therapy might be useful for lowering blood pressure. When testing was being done on individuals with heart failure, scientists concentrated specifically on the muscles used to extend the knee, looking for improvement in power, which they specified as a combination of force and velocity. This is crucial for athletes in training, such as sprinting or gymnastics. That easy-to-take-for-granted strength is also required by people who want to climb stairs, move furniture around, or simply get up from the toilet, an action that — if they’re unable to accomplish — is what most often puts people in a nursing home.

Is Avoiding the Sun Worse than Smoking?

Over the past 40+ years, dermatologists have promoted the idea that you should never be exposed to direct sunlight because it will damage your skin and cause skin cancer. You might wonder, well what about vitamin D? No problem, as according to the American Academy of Dermatology, vitamin D deficiency can easily be addressed with vitamin D supplements. What they fail to acknowledge and appreciate is that when you’re exposed to sunlight, many important biological processes occur in your skin, not just vitamin D production. This is separate from swallowing oral vitamin D, which is an important but, according to many experts, clearly inferior alternative. While it will improve your vitamin D status, you forgo the many benefits sunlight offers aside from vitamin D production. Unfortunately, the entire focus of most dermatologists is preventing skin damage, which means ignoring the other side—the benefits—of the sun exposure equation. This includes heightened protection against a number of internal cancers and other chronic diseases, including heart disease, which kills far more people than melanoma does. Ironically, recent research shows that vitamin D also improves survival outcomes for melanoma patients. It’s also important for cognitive health, immune function, healthy pregnancy and infant development, and strong, healthy bones, just to name a few.

For Healthy Skin, Feed Your Body Right

When it comes to your skin, beauty is more than skin-deep. What you eat has a lot to do with the appearance of your complexion, and a number of skin problems, such as acne, can be cleared up simply by altering your diet. As a general rule, a diet high in fresh vegetables, which are rich in bioflavanoids, and plenty of omega-3 fat will lay the necessary groundwork for a healthy, youthful complexion. Certain nutrients also have protective benefits, helping you ward off the damage caused by exposure to the elements. Do remember, however, that loading up on certain skin-clearing foods while still eating some of the most damaging will likely not make a significant impact. For example, insulin and leptin resistance are major accelerants of the aging processes, which affect both your inside and outside, so it’s important to keep your insulin and leptin levels low if you want to maintain a youthful look — not to mention optimal health. The most effective way to do this is by reducing or eliminating processed foods, as they’re high in refined sugar, processed fructose, trans fats, processed salt, and other detrimental ingredients. Drugs and alcohol are also clearly enemies of a glowing complexion, and pasteurized dairy products are sometimes to blame for skin ailments. One of the first strategies you can use to improve your skin health is to make sure you are getting enough high quality omega-3 fats. This is such a reliable indicator that I can usually tell someone's omega-3 needs just by shaking their hand. If their hand is not smooth as a baby's behind, it's usually a strong indication of omega-3 deficiency.

Magnesium — A Key Nutrient for Health and Disease Prevention

Magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in your body. More than 3,750 magnesium-binding sites have been detected on human proteins, and it's required for more than 300 different enzymes in your body. As is the case with vitamin D, if you don't have enough magnesium, your body simply cannot function optimally, and insufficient cellular magnesium levels set the stage for deterioration of metabolic function that can snowball into more serious health problems. For starters, magnesium is critical for the optimization of your mitochondria, which have enormous potential to influence your health, especially the prevention of cancer.

Should You Really Chew Your Food 32 Times?

You probably don't give much thought to chewing your food. For most of us it's second-nature, and once you put food in your mouth chewing it is likely as automatic as breathing. Paying more attention to the way you chew, however, especially how long and how thoroughly you chew, may be a simple way to improve your health. People who are obese, for instance, tend to chew less (and for shorter periods) than those who are a normal weight. Research also shows that increasing the number of chews before swallowing reduces meal size by up to nearly 15 percent, which researchers believe might be an effective strategy to help with weight management. "Eating slowly contributes to a lower risk of obesity, probably because it could aid appetite control. Chewing thoroughly is an effective strategy to reduce eating rate … ," the researchers explained in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Yet, chewing slowly is useful for far more than just weight management.

GMO Cookie Is Crumbling

In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is the research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), determined glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, to be a “probable carcinogen” (Class 2A). This determination was based on evidence showing the popular weed killer can cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and lung cancer in humans, along with “convincing evidence” it can also cause cancer in animals. Monsanto has maintained that the classification as a carcinogen is wrong and continues to tout glyphosate (and Roundup) as one of the safest pesticides on the planet. However, they’ve now been slapped with a growing number of lawsuits alleging they long knew that Roundup’s glyphosate could harm human health. In fact, internal Monsanto documents reveal they knew over 30 years ago that glyphosate caused adenomas and carcinomas in the rats they studied – and that’s only the beginning of Monsanto’s trouble. As each day goes by, the GMO (genetically modified organism) cookie continues to crumble.

Hidden Science Reveals Major Tamiflu Scam

Anti-viral flu drugs like Tamiflu (oseltamivir) are stockpiled in many countries, including the US, for treating and preventing seasonal and pandemic influenza. Influenza can be deadly, but if you're otherwise healthy, it typically is a self-limiting illness that runs its course in a few days and requires no treatment. Historically speaking, there have been flu outbreaks, such as the Hong Kong flu of 1968 to 1969, that were estimated to have killed over 1 million people. If a particularly lethal flu strain were to emerge, the idea behind stockpiling is that governments would already have anti-viral flu drugs at the ready so they could potentially save thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of lives. It sounds good in theory, but the reality is much less convincing. The most glaring issue stems from the fact that the available anti-viral drugs do not appear to be very effective at fighting the flu and instead are associated with serious side effects. The US government has spent an estimated $1.3 billion to stockpile Tamiflu, despite a review from the Cochrane Collaboration that questioned the drug's effectiveness, and called the billions of dollars spent to stockpile the drug a waste of money. The Cochrane review not only highlighted Tamiflu's lack of effectiveness and side effects, and governments' wasted billions to stockpile it. It also highlighted the fact that drug makers hid a significant amount of negative data from the public.

DuPont and Teflon: Masters of Deception

Deceptive and manipulative public relations strategies are the standard approach of the chemical industry. People may believe chemical companies would strive to create chemicals that are as harmless as possible, and to provide strict safety instructions for use when they're not, but history has shown that this isn't the case. Instead, the industry promotes chemicals as harmless even when they are well aware of the risks. What's worse, companies have been repeatedly found to have lied to federal and local regulators, consumers, and even their own employees about the toxicity of various chemicals. DuPont is one such company, which has recently seen a slew of negative press following the filing of thousands of personal injury claims in what The Intercept1 calls "an epic legal battle" against the company — a battle that has been waged for the last 15 years, with little media coverage. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, also known as C8), was an essential ingredient in DuPont's non-stick cookware for decades. PFOA is now the subject of about 3,500 personal injury claims against DuPont, including 37 claims for wrongful death.

Cannabis for the Treatment of Epilepsy, and More

Many drugs are developed not because there's a great medical need, but rather because there's big money to be made from them. In many cases, holistic therapies and medicines already exist that can take the place of any number of synthetic pharmaceuticals. Cannabis is one such therapy, and according to Dr. Gedde, "it's time to ask questions and look at a new way of thinking about this plant." A wealth of research shows marijuana does indeed have outstanding promise as a medicinal plant, largely due to its cannabidiol (CBD) content. Cannabinoids interact with your body by way of naturally occurring cannabinoid receptors embedded in cell membranes throughout your body. There are cannabinoid receptors in your brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, immune system, and more. Both the therapeutic and psychoactive properties of marijuana occur when a cannabinoid activates a cannabinoid receptor. According to Dr. Gedde, cannabis is certainly far safer than most prescription drugs, and there's enough information to compare it against the known toxicities of many drugs currently in use. This includes liver and kidney toxicity, gastrointestinal damage, nerve damage and, of course, death. Moreover, cannabidiol and other cannabis products often work when other medications fail, so not only are they generally safer, cannabis preparations also tend to provide greater efficacy.