News from the left

In June 2011, the European Food Safety Authority has called for submission of relevant scientific data on the safety on aspartame, a contested sweetener made of two amino acids and methanol. Campaigners have pointed out that the Authority (EFSA) is missing important but damning details in its review. The FDA's approval of the substance, says Betty Martini "was a political decision, taken over the objection of the FDA's own scientific panel. Studies used to obtain approval were sanitized, to hide damaging effects the sweetener had on laboratory animals and eventually, Donald Rumsfeld was brought in to push through the approval." Now, new data has come to light confirming that early studies showed serious problems and that the FDA knew about the dangers the studies found. In an open letter to the European Food Safety Agency, which is reproduced in the second part of this article, Betty Martini points to those studies, which recently emerged, only as a result of citizens making and pushing through FOI act information requests for the documents. Here is Betty Martini's open letter to EFSA ......

As counter-intuitive as this question might seem, nicotine is actually a nutrient source. It is one form in which we can obtain a vital nutrient: vitamin B3, also called niacin or nicotinic acid. I have never seen this angle to smoking discussed in a clear form until I came across, through some friends on facebook, a very informative but kind of hidden away write-up by a parent who refused to just accept as fact what "everybody knows" - that kids start to smoke because of tobacco company propaganda. Ironically, the article was languishing in a place called the CyberCemetery, an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct government agencies and commissions that have issued a final report). The source URL is http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/tobacco/_PReptdisc/00000025.htm Here is the text......

Thanks for this article go to Andrew Saul, editor of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service which you can subscribe to at http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html. You can also see other articles at the orthomolecular.org site. (OMNS, Jan 17, 2012) It's a nutritional "Catch 22": The public is told, confusingly: "Vitamins are good, but vitamin supplements are not. Only vitamins from food will help you. So just eat a good diet. Do not take supplements! But by the way, there is no difference between natural and synthetic vitamins." Wait a minute. What's the real story here? A recent health study reported that the risk of heart failure decreased with increasing blood levels of vitamin C [1]. The benefit of vitamin C (ascorbate) was highly significant. Persons with the lowest plasma levels of ascorbate had the highest risk of heart failure, and persons with the highest levels of vitamin C had the lowest risk of heart failure. This finding confirms the knowledge derived over the last 50 years that vitamin C is a major essential factor in cardiovascular health [2,3]. The study raises several important questions about diet and vitamin supplements. Was it Food or Supplements? The report discussed vitamin C as if it were simply an indicator of how many fruits and vegetables were consumed by the participants. Yet, ironically, the study's results show little improvement in the risk for heart failure from consuming fruits and vegetables. This implies that the real factor in reducing the risk was indeed the amount of vitamin C consumed. Moreover, the study appears to utterly ignore the widespread use of vitamin C supplements to improve cardiovascular health. In fact, out of four quartile groups, the quartile with the highest plasma vitamin C had six to ten times the rate of vitamin C supplementation of the lowest quartile, but this fact was not emphasized. This type of selective attention to food sources of vitamin C, while dismissing supplements as an important source, appears to be an attempt to marginalize the importance of vitamin supplements. Many medical and nutritional reports have maintained that there is little difference between natural and synthetic vitamins. This is known to be true for some essential nutrients. The ascorbate found in widely available vitamin C tablets is identical to the ascorbate found in fruits and vegetables [3]. Linus Pauling emphasized this fact, and explained how ordinary vitamin C, inexpensively manufactured from glucose, could improve health in many important ways [4]. Indeed, the above-mentioned study specifically measured the plasma level of ascorbate, which was shown to be an important factor associated with lower risk of heart failure [1, 2]. The study did not measure blood plasma levels of the components of fruits and vegetables. It measured vitamin C. A known rationale for this dramatic finding is that vitamin C helps to prevent inflammation in the arteries by several mechanisms. It is a necessary co-factor for the synthesis of collagen, which is a major component of arteries. Vitamin C is also an important antioxidant throughout the body that can help to recycle other antioxidants like vitamin E and glutathione in the artery walls [2,3]. This was underscored by a report that high plasma levels of vitamin C are associated with a 50% reduction in risk for stroke [5]....

America's Largest Database Confirms: No Deaths from Vitamins The new 203-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, published online at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2010%20NPDS%20Annual%20Report.pdf, shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin. Additionally, there were no deaths whatsoever from any amino acid or dietary mineral supplement. Three people died from non-supplement mineral poisoning: two from medical use of sodium and one from non-supplemental iron. On page 131, the AAPCC report specifically indicates that the iron fatality was not from a nutritional supplement. USA: The FDA is closing in on supplements More telling about the FDA’s strategy for more heavy-handed regulation is the statement that “If you look at the numbers of NDI submissions versus the number of supplements introduced to the market since 1994, it would appear there is a significant lag in compliance.” On its face, the marketplace has changed over the last seventeen years. But who is responsible for this 17-year lag in compliance? The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) required manufacturers to submit pre-market notification applications for supplements and new ingredients when there is a history of use or other evidence establishing that an ingredient is safe when used as directed. The FDA has 75 days to accept or reject the application. A non-decision by the FDA means that the Agency accepts the evidence and that the product has complied, is approved, and can be marketed to the consuming public. Alternatively, a formal petition for a review and FDA issuance of an order prescribing the conditions under which a new dietary ingredient can be used and reasonably be expected to be safe, with the FDA having to respond within 180 days, can be filed. Again, shouldn’t a non-decision on a petition be considered as final Agency approval? If the Agency does not issue a decision either way, or if it cannot find a decision that was issued over the previous seventeen years, has it been the industry or the FDA itself who has not been in compliance with DSHEA? Apparently, the FDA believes that manufacturers and suppliers have not met the FDA’s own self-interpreted DSHEA burden of proof standard to show to the FDA that there is reasonable evidence that supplements and new ingredients in supplements are safe. I wish the FDA were that efficient on pharmaceuticals... Some more details on this story and an action link Food and Nutraceutical Regulations - Global Snapshot Every system of regulation has its pros and cons. The labelling of health-related foods should be based on scientific evidence, always bearing in mind harmonisation with global international standards. There should be a harmonisation of food regulations around the world. Economic growth and urbanisation are not enough evidence of the future growth of nutraceuticals, health demographic trends also support these growth forecasts. Consumers are deeply concerned about how their health care is managed, administered and priced. As health care cost has become high the consumers are frustrated with the expensive disease-treatment approach predominant in modern medicine; the consumer is now seeking alternative beneficial products like dietary supplement, functional food and nutraceuticals. With innovative delivery mechanism to facilitate the use of nutraceuticals amongst its target groups, the world market is expected to witness a gradual shift toward natural ingredients. The article discusses several of the major food regulatory systems and compares them. It becomes obvious that there are huge national differences in how to treat foods and in particular healthy foods. The question is: If those laws are to be somehow brought closer to each other, which would be the model to follow? I believe such a model (for ideal food legislation) needs to be worked out, to balance the current attempts - such as Codex Alimentarius - to put in the international food laws that are written by the large corporations. Can Western guidelines govern Eastern herbal traditions? Other supporters of herbal medicine worry that the rules are too demanding and could ban some therapies on which people depend. Adam Smith, science and communications officer for the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANHI) in Dorking, United Kingdom, a non-governmental campaign group promoting the use of herbal medicines and other approaches to healthcare, fears that patients will lose out on some Asian medicines because they have not been used in Europe for the requisite 15 years, even though they have been consumed in East Asia for considerably longer. ANHI also detects a perceived bias in the THMPD towards products developed in the West, which often contain just one herb. Traditional Asian products contain mixtures of several herbs — making it difficult, time consuming and expensive to meet the directive's requirement to identify and quantify the active botanical ingredients or other biological agents in a herbal product. “These technical assessments require expensive methods,” says Smith. “The cost burden is a problem, particularly for small businesses,” he adds. Middleton agrees that conducting scientific analyses are “tough” — even for products containing just one herb... - - - News grabs are now being collected in a different way and will appear on this site a a stream of articles, linked as I find them. There will no longer be the weekly post that you are used to, and I do not know yet how the weekly feedblitz email alert will turn out. You can always check back directly at the site, however and you might want to get the RSS feed for notifications. The address of the site: http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp the RSS feed for newsgrabs will be feed://feeds.feedburner.com/Robin-Good-Breaking-New-Media-News and the RSS feed for "features", articles that are original to the site, is feed://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/index.xml...

America's Largest Database Confirms: No Deaths from Vitamins The new 203-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, published online at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2010%20NPDS%20Annual%20Report.pdf, shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin. Additionally, there were no deaths whatsoever from any amino acid or dietary mineral supplement. Three people died from non-supplement mineral poisoning: two from medical use of sodium and one from non-supplemental iron. On page 131, the AAPCC report specifically indicates that the iron fatality was not from a nutritional supplement. USA: The FDA is closing in on supplements More telling about the FDA’s strategy for more heavy-handed regulation is the statement that “If you look at the numbers of NDI submissions versus the number of supplements introduced to the market since 1994, it would appear there is a significant lag in compliance.” On its face, the marketplace has changed over the last seventeen years. But who is responsible for this 17-year lag in compliance? The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) required manufacturers to submit pre-market notification applications for supplements and new ingredients when there is a history of use or other evidence establishing that an ingredient is safe when used as directed. The FDA has 75 days to accept or reject the application. A non-decision by the FDA means that the Agency accepts the evidence and that the product has complied, is approved, and can be marketed to the consuming public. Alternatively, a formal petition for a review and FDA issuance of an order prescribing the conditions under which a new dietary ingredient can be used and reasonably be expected to be safe, with the FDA having to respond within 180 days, can be filed. Again, shouldn’t a non-decision on a petition be considered as final Agency approval? If the Agency does not issue a decision either way, or if it cannot find a decision that was issued over the previous seventeen years, has it been the industry or the FDA itself who has not been in compliance with DSHEA? Apparently, the FDA believes that manufacturers and suppliers have not met the FDA’s own self-interpreted DSHEA burden of proof standard to show to the FDA that there is reasonable evidence that supplements and new ingredients in supplements are safe. I wish the FDA were that efficient on pharmaceuticals... Some more details on this story and an action link Food and Nutraceutical Regulations - Global Snapshot Every system of regulation has its pros and cons. The labelling of health-related foods should be based on scientific evidence, always bearing in mind harmonisation with global international standards. There should be a harmonisation of food regulations around the world. Economic growth and urbanisation are not enough evidence of the future growth of nutraceuticals, health demographic trends also support these growth forecasts. Consumers are deeply concerned about how their health care is managed, administered and priced. As health care cost has become high the consumers are frustrated with the expensive disease-treatment approach predominant in modern medicine; the consumer is now seeking alternative beneficial products like dietary supplement, functional food and nutraceuticals. With innovative delivery mechanism to facilitate the use of nutraceuticals amongst its target groups, the world market is expected to witness a gradual shift toward natural ingredients. The article discusses several of the major food regulatory systems and compares them. It becomes obvious that there are huge national differences in how to treat foods and in particular healthy foods. The question is: If those laws are to be somehow brought closer to each other, which would be the model to follow? I believe such a model (for ideal food legislation) needs to be worked out, to balance the current attempts - such as Codex Alimentarius - to put in the international food laws that are written by the large corporations. Can Western guidelines govern Eastern herbal traditions? Other supporters of herbal medicine worry that the rules are too demanding and could ban some therapies on which people depend. Adam Smith, science and communications officer for the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANHI) in Dorking, United Kingdom, a non-governmental campaign group promoting the use of herbal medicines and other approaches to healthcare, fears that patients will lose out on some Asian medicines because they have not been used in Europe for the requisite 15 years, even though they have been consumed in East Asia for considerably longer. ANHI also detects a perceived bias in the THMPD towards products developed in the West, which often contain just one herb. Traditional Asian products contain mixtures of several herbs — making it difficult, time consuming and expensive to meet the directive's requirement to identify and quantify the active botanical ingredients or other biological agents in a herbal product. “These technical assessments require expensive methods,” says Smith. “The cost burden is a problem, particularly for small businesses,” he adds. Middleton agrees that conducting scientific analyses are “tough” — even for products containing just one herb... - - - News grabs are now being collected in a different way and will appear on this site a a stream of articles, linked as I find them. There will no longer be the weekly post that you are used to, and I do not know yet how the weekly feedblitz email alert will turn out. You can always check back directly at the site, however and you might want to get the RSS feed for notifications. The address of the site: http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp the RSS feed for newsgrabs will be feed://feeds.feedburner.com/Robin-Good-Breaking-New-Media-News and the RSS feed for "features", articles that are original to the site, is feed://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/index.xml...

Rick Santorum's comments about gay marriage in a 2003 interview with the Associated Press have been getting a lot of mileage lately, but they are often misreported. In a January 4 profile of Santorum, for example, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg describes the notorious quote this way:

He once offhandedly invoked bestiality in arguing that states should have the right to regulate homosexual acts. "That is not to pick on homosexuality," he said. "It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog." 

That makes it sound as if Santorum was saying homosexuality is not as bad as pedophilia or bestiality, which is the interpretation he embraced in a January 4 interview with CNN's John King:

King: How do you connect homosexuality to bestiality? And you went on in that interview to talk about bigamy. Connect those dots.

Santorum: Hold on a second, John. Read the quote. I said it's not, it is not; I didn't say it is. It says it's not. I'm trying to understand what you're trying to make the point. I said it's not those things. I didn't connect them; I specifically excluded them.

Nice try, but the relevant passage (which King read) does not support that gloss:

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. 

In context, the it clearly refers to marriage, not to homosexuality. Santorum is saying marriage traditionally has excluded certain relationships, including those between people of the same sex, between adults and children, and between people and animals. He is not necessarily saying these relationships are morally equivalent, although that seems to be the implication. In any event, Santorum makes it pretty clear in the same interview that he thinks sex between two men is bad enough that it should be a crime:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution; this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family....

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. 

Here Santorum is not just objecting, on constitutional grounds, to the Supreme Court's interference with a state's decision to criminalize homosexual sex; he is defending such laws, saying sodomy "destroys the basic unit of our society." Evidently he does not think that position will help him win the Republican nomination. As with his bizarre denial that the federal government imprisons nonviolent drug offenders (with families!), Santorum is not defending his principles; he is trying to weasel out of their implications.

Over the past week, Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan has been weighing the pros and cons of libertarianism. On Friday, he brought his readers into the discussion, publishing several of their negative takes. One comment in particular struck me as worth responding to. Here’s what Sullivan published:

A real libertarian should be just as concerned about a State government's infringement of individual liberty as the Federal government's. There should be no distinction. Period. Instead, for some strange reason, American libertarians always rail against Federal power and champion the cause of unfettered State power. Why do you think American libertarians historically champion the cause of unfettered State power in the name of "individual liberty"?

For starters, it is completely incorrect to say that “American libertarians historically champion the cause of unfettered State power.” Moorfield Storey, the great libertarian lawyer who co-founded the NAACP and served as its first president, won the 1917 Supreme Court case of Buchanan v. Warley by arguing that a Jim Crow residential segregation law in Louisville, Kentucky violated property rights under the 14th Amendment, which commands, “No State shall...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Storey correctly argued that the 14th Amendment forbids state and local governments from violating the rights of both blacks and whites.

Take a look at three of the most prominent Supreme Court cases from recent years and you’ll find libertarians making the exact same argument in favor of individual rights and against unfettered state and local power:

• In 2003 the libertarian Cato Institute and the libertarian Institute for Justice each submitted friend of the court briefs in the case of Lawrence v. Texas urging the Supreme Court to strike down that state’s odious ban on gay sex. In his majority opinion nullifying Texas’ Homosexual Conduct Law, Justice Anthony Kennedy repeatedly cited the arguments put forward in the Cato brief. So much for championing unfettered state power.

• In 2005 the aforementioned Institute for Justice brought the case of Kelo v. City of New London to the Supreme Court. At issue was an eminent domain land grab by local officials in New London, Connecticut. Regrettably, the Court got that one wrong. Nonetheless, the libertarians who litigated the case (and thereby brought eminent domain abuse into the national spotlight) did so by urging the federal courts to force local officials to respect fundamental rights under the Constitution.

• Finally, in the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago, libertarian lawyer Alan Gura convinced the Supreme Court to strike down Chicago’s draconian handgun ban because it violated the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as applied to the states via the 14th Amendment. Once again, this was a libertarian argument which held that state and local governments may not violate fundamental rights.

I happen to agree that “a real libertarian should be just as concerned about a State government's infringement of individual liberty as the Federal government's.” But as the facts clearly demonstrate, plenty of real libertarians are concerned with both.

Why is Rick Santorum running for president? Because America is in trouble and he knows why.

Faith and family are under attack. "Moral relativism," he warns, is breeding "aberrant behavior." Gay rights advocates are bent on "secularization." Liberals have brought about a "decaying culture."

Santorum insists that gay marriage will destroy the family, "the very foundation of our country." Lamenting the scandal of pedophile priests, he wrote in a Catholic publication: "When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

It's a familiar line of argument among religious conservatives, and it has the virtues of clarity, simplicity, and plausibility. But there is one notable weakness in his case: a mass of evidence that amounts to a thunderous refutation.

Santorum takes it for granted that religious belief, at least of the Christian variety, is a powerful force for moral behavior. That's not apparent from looking at this country.

He thinks America has been on a downhill slide for many years, thanks to feminism, gay rights, pornography, and other vile intruders. But where is the evidence that the developments cited by Santorum are producing harmful side effects?

In the past couple of decades, most indicators of moral and social health have gotten better, not worse. Crime has plummeted. Teen pregnancy has declined by 39 percent. Abortion rates among adolescents are less than half what they were.

The incidence of divorce is down. As of 2007, 48 percent of high school students had engaged in sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. What "decaying culture" is he talking about?

It sounds obvious that when people practice a religion that preaches strong morality and responsible conduct, they will behave better than people who follow their own inclinations. But what is obvious is not always true.

America is a good place to judge the value of faith in promoting virtue. There is a great deal of variation among the 50 states in religious observance—and a great deal of variation in social ills. It turns out that religiosity does not translate into good behavior, and disregard for religion does not go hand-in-hand with vice. Quite the contrary.

Consider homicide, which is not only socially harmful but a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. Mississippi has the highest rate of church attendance in America, according to a Gallup survey, with 63 percent of people saying they go to church "weekly or almost weekly." But Mississippians are far more likely to be murdered than other Americans.

On the other hand, we have Vermont, where people are the most likely to skip church. Its murder rate is only about one-fourth as high as the rest of the country. New Hampshire, the second-least religious state, has the lowest murder rate.

These are no flukes. Of the 10 states with the most worshippers, all but one have higher than average homicide rates. Of the 11 states with the lowest church attendance, by contrast, 10 have low homicide rates.

Teen pregnancy also tends to follow a course precisely the opposite of what Santorum preaches. Almost every one of the most religious states suffers from more teen pregnancy than the norm—while the least religious ones enjoy less.

What impact does gay marriage have on how kids handle sex? Massachusetts, the first state to legalize it, has less teen pregnancy than the country as a whole. Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which have also sanctioned same-sex unions, are also far better than average.

Does gay marriage undermine the health and stability of heterosexual marriage? Not so you can tell. Massachusetts has the nation's lowest divorce rate. Iowa and Connecticut are also better than most. Vermont and New Hampshire are about average. In the Bible Belt, by contrast, marriages are generally more prone to break up.

Santorum presents himself as a man of faith who insists on confronting stark facts that many people would rather ignore. In fact, in his indictment of tolerance, individual conscience, sexual freedom, and secular morality, he is not telling truths but spinning sanctimonious fairy tales. American culture is not sick, and Santorum is no healer.

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