Friday, September 12, 2014

Sleep problems may be linked to brain shrinkage: stud

Sleep problems may be linked to brain shrinkage: study




Jordan Chittley, CTVNews.ca Writer

Published Wednesday, September 3, 2014 5:43PM EDT 
Last Updated Thursday, September 4, 2014 8:43AM EDT

Can a lack of shut-eye actually cause your brain to shrink?

Sleep loss may lead to a faster rate of decline in the brain, a new study suggests. It's an important finding because lower brain volumes are linked to an increased risk of memory problems and dementia.

Other studies have concluded sleep problems result in poorer performance on cognitive tests. But the new research --published in the journal Neurology Wednesday -- found the brain actually changes over the years.

"This is a really important finding because we are trying to find out what the purpose of sleep is, and why it is important that we get sleep," lead author and Oxford researcher Claire Sextontold CTV News. "We found sleep problems were related to rate decline in some areas of the brain."

To conduct the study, researchers studied 147 adults of various agesover several years. The participants had MRI brain scans 3.5 years apart, in addition to completing a questionnaire about their sleep habits.

The questionnaire looked at how long people slept, how long it took them to fall asleep and if they used any sleeping medications.

About a third of the people in the study had chronically bad sleeps.

At the end of the study, brain scans showed more rapid decline in widespread areas of the brainfor participants who had sleep problems – a finding that was worse for those 60 or older.

"Poor sleep quality was associated with reduced volume within the superior frontal cortex and a greater rate of atrophy across the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices," the studysaid.

 However,researchers acknowledge that it may be the other way around – meaning that if the brain is shrinking, it may lead to sleeping problems.

"A key issue, which our study was not designed to explore directly, is the degree to which poor sleep quality is a cause or a consequence of brain atrophy," the study reads.

Sleep is good for us, Sexton said, because it helps restore and repair the brain.

"While the study isn't definitive…try to get a better sleep," Dr. Andrew Lim, a neurologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital, told CTV News. "I wouldn't wait 20 years to see if the study was right or not."

Sexton said her goal is to see if improved sleep habits can lead to improved brain health.
"This is really exciting because it might be if we can improve people's sleep then this can help slow or prevent declines in brain volumes," she said.

If you aren't getting enough sleep, Sexton suggests getting into a good night-time routine, not checking emails or messages in bed, not having caffeine late at night and getting more exercise during the day. If problems persist, she suggests seeing a doctor about possible medications.

With files from CTV's Medical Specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip

An Electronic Silent Spring

An Electronic Silent Spring


I have just been reading a complimentary copy of Katie Singer's new book entitled "An Electronic Silent Spring" and it is superb. It aims to repeat Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", which was about pollution with pesticides, with a similar book on electromagnetic pollution.

It is written for the lay-person and but includes contributions from well known scientists in the field, evidence from people who are suffering from electromagnetic pollution and tricks that the "Industry" has used to suppress this information. 

Katie is herself electrosensitive, so knows about it first-hand and even suffered ill effects from the computer she used to write the book. Her book is well written and, once I started reading it, I found it very hard to put down. This is the sort of thing we need more of and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone interested in the subject. It is also a valuable source of information for anyone wanting to challenge the power of the Industry and governments to impose on all of us what are still dangerous and unproven technologies.

The paperback version is available from Amazon in the UK for £12.99 and the Kindle version is £5.49.See

Happy reading.
Andrew
(Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy)

Thursday, September 11, 2014

More towers, more complaints, less action

More towers, more complaints, less action


How Apple Is Invading Our Bodies

How Apple Is Invading Our Bodies

Apple Watch Cover
TIME Photo-illustration. Hand: Milos Luzanin–Alamy

The Silicon Valley giant has redrawn the line that separates our technology and ourselves. That may not be a good thing.

For the full story, read this week’s TIME magazine.

The great thing about the Apple Watch is that it’s always there—you don’t even have to take it out of your bag to look at it, the way you would with an iPhone. But unlike an iPhone you can’t put the Apple Watch away either. It’s always with you. During the company’s press event the artist Banksy posted a drawing to his Twitter feed of an iPhone growing roots that strangle and sink into the wrist of the hand holding it. You can see where he was coming from. This is technology establishing a new beachhead. To wear a device as powerful as the Apple Watch makes you ever so slightly post-human.The Apple Watch is very personal—“personal” and “intimate” were words that Apple CEO Tim Cook and his colleagues used over and over again when presenting it to the public for the first time. That’s where the watch is likely to change things, because it does something computers aren’t generally supposed to: it lives on your body. It perches on your wrist, like one of Cinderella’s helpful bluebirds. It gets closer than we’re used technology getting. It gets inside your personal bubble. We’re used to technology being safely Other, but the Apple Watch wants to snuggle up and become part of your Self.
This is new, and slightly unnerving. When technologies get adopted as fast as we tend to adopt Apple’s products, there are always unintended consequences. When the iPhone came out it was praised to the skies as a design and engineering marvel, because it is one, but no one really understood what it would be like to have it in our lives. Nobody anticipated the way iPhones exert a constant gravitational tug on our attention. Do I have e-mail? What’s happening on Twitter? Could I get away with playing Tiny Wings at this meeting? When you’re carrying a smartphone, your attention is never entirely undivided.
The reality of living with an iPhone, or any smart, connected device, is that it makes reality feel just that little bit less real. One gets over-connected, to the point where the thoughts and opinions of distant anonymous strangers start to feel more urgent than those of your loved ones who are in the same room as you. One forgets how to be alone and undistracted. Ironically enough experiences don’t feel fully real till you’ve used your phone to make them virtual—tweeted them or tumbled them or Instagrammed them or YouTubed them, and the world has congratulated you for doing so. Smartphones create needs we never had before, and were probably better off without.
What might post-humanity be like? The paradox of a wearable device is that it both gives you control and takes it away at the same time. Consider the watch’s fitness applications. They capture all data that your body generates, your heart and activity and so on, gathers it up and stores and returns it to you in a form you can use. Once the development community gets through apping it, there’s no telling what else it might gather. This will change your experience of your body. The wristwatch made the idea of not knowing what time it was seem bizarre; in five years it might seem bizarre not to know how many calories you’ve eaten today, or what your resting heart rate is.
But wearables also ask you to give up control. Your phone will start telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat and how far you should run. It’s going to get in between you and your body and mediate that relationship. Wearables will make your physical self visible to the virtual world in the form of information, an indelible digital body-print, and that information is going to behave like any other information behaves these days. It will be copied and circulated. It will go places you don’t expect. People will use that information to track you and market to you. It will be bought and sold and leaked—imagine a data-spill comparable to the recent iCloud leak, only with Apple Watch data instead of naked selfies.
The Apple Watch represents a redrawing of the map that locates technology in one place and our bodies in another. The line between the two will never be as easy to find again. Once you’re OK with wearing technology, the only way forward is inward: the next product launch after the Apple Watch would logically be the iMplant. If Apple succeeds in legitimizing wearables as a category, it will have successfully established the founding node in a network that could spread throughout our bodies, with Apple setting the standards. Then we’ll really have to decide how much control we want—and what we’re prepared to give up for it.

12 Facts About Microwaves That Should Forever Terminate Their Use

JULY 23, 2014 by MARCO TORRES

12 Facts About Microwaves That Should Forever Terminate Their Use


Are microwaves a benign bastion of convenience or a sinister contributor to biological and nutritional damage? A growing percentage of people are now heeding the advice of holistic health experts and disposing of their microwaves due to the dangers of microwaved food. Regardless of where you stand, humans are the only animals on the planet who destroy the nutritional value of their food before eating it, and the use of microwaves is no exception.

Microwaves are a source of electromagnetic energy (a form ofnonionizing form of radiation) electronically generated. When penetrating the aliments, they trigger an inner rotation of the water molecules inside the food. This rotation triggers a friction between the molecules and the result is a rapid growth in temperature.
Microwaves use super-fast particles to literally radiate the contents of water inside food and bring it to boil. Not only has microwave use been linked to causing infertility in men, but it also denatures many of the essential proteins in the food making them virtually indigestible.

Most animals will only consume food in its natural, unprocessed state, but humans actually go out of their way to render food nutritionally worthless before eating it. Think about all the prepackaged and processed foods we purchase and consume annually. It's no wonder the state of our health is in dire straits.

Microwave ovens work physically, biochemically and physiologically, producing ions and various free radicals, which destroy viruses and bacteria, but not toxins and microtoxins. The experts have concluded that food cooked in microwaves loses between 60% and 90% of its vital energy and, at the same time, the structural disintegration processes accelerates. Also, the nutrient substances are altered, leading to digestive diseases. These microwaves can increase both the number of cancerous cells in blood and the number of stomach and intestinal cancerous cells.

Microwaves leaking radiation is a serious issue. Serious enough for the FDA to set legal limits on the leakage permitted by every microwave manufacturer. However, the only way to completely eliminate the radiation dangers associated with microwaves is not to use one. Microwave radiation has been known to cause cataracts, birth defects, cancer and other serious illnesses.
Because of these causes the microwave ovens were banned in the Soviet Union in 1976. Soviet scientists found that the microwave exposure decreases the ability of some vitamins to by absorbed by the human body, dramatically accelerates the structural disintegration of all foods and reduces the metabolic stress of the alkaloids, glycosides and galactoses.
In 1991, the Swiss Doctor Hans Ulrich Hertel made a study that demonstrated that cooking or heating food presents much greater risks for health than the traditionally cooked food. He found that people who ate microwave prepared food recorded losses in the hemoglobines and lymphoites.
In 2003, a Spanish governmental study elaborated in Murcia demonstrated that the vegetables and fruits cooked in a microwave lost a percentage of 97% of the substances that contribute to reducing the incidence of coronary heart diseases.

In Dr. Lita Lee's book, Health Effects of Microwave Radiation -- Microwave Ovens, and in the March and September 1991 issues of Earthletter, she stated that every microwave oven leaks electro-magnetic radiation, harms food, and converts substances cooked in it to dangerous organ-toxic and carcinogenic products. 

In Comparative Study of Food Prepared Conventionally and in the Microwave Oven, published by Raum & Zelt in 1992, at 3(2): 43, it states:

"Artificially produced microwaves, including those in ovens, are produced from alternating current and force a billion or more polarity reversals per second in every food molecule they hit. Production of unnatural molecules is inevitable. Naturally occurring amino acids have been observed to undergo isomeric changes (changes in shape morphing) as well as transformation into toxic forms, under the impact of microwaves produced in ovens."

There are no atoms, molecules or cells of any organic system able to withstand such a violent, destructive power for any extended period of time, not even in the low energy range of milliwatts. Microwaves quickly destroy the delicate molecules of vitamins and phytonutrients (plant medicines) naturally found in foods. One study showed that microwaving vegetables destroys up to 97% of the nutritional content (vitamins and other plant-based nutrients that prevent disease, boost immune function and enhance health).

Dr. Hertel was the first scientist to conceive and carry out a quality clinical study on the effects microwaved nutrients have on the blood and physiology of the human body. His small but well controlled study showed the degenerative force produced in microwave ovens and the food processed in them. The scientific conclusion showed that microwave cooking changed the nutrients in the food; and, changes took place in the participants' blood that could cause deterioration in the human system. Hertel's scientific study was done along with Dr. Bernard H. Blanc of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University Institute for Biochemistry.
12 Enumerated Effects of Microwaves
1. A breakdown of the human “life-energy field” in those who were exposed to microwave ovens while in operation, with side-effects to the human energy field of increasingly longer duration;
2. A degeneration of the cellular voltage parallels during the process of using the apparatus, especially in the blood and lymphatic areas;
3. A degeneration and destabilization of the external energy activated potentials of food utilization within the processes of human metabolism;
4. A degeneration and destabilization of internal cellular membrane potentials while transferring catabolic [metabolic breakdown] processes into the blood serum from the digestive process;
5. Degeneration and circuit breakdowns of electrical nerve impulses within the junction potentials of the cerebrum [the front portion of the brain where thought and higher functions reside];
6. A degeneration and breakdown of nerve electrical circuits and loss of energy field symmetry in the neuroplexuses [nerve centers] both in the front and the rear of the central and autonomic nervous systems;
7. Loss of balance and circuiting of the bioelectric strengths within the ascending reticular activating system [the system which controls the function of consciousness];
8. A long term cumulative loss of vital energies within humans, animals and plants that were located within a 500-meter radius of the operational equipment;
9. Long lasting residual effects of magnetic “deposits” were located throughout the nervous system and lymphatic system;
10. A destabilization and interruption in the production of hormones and maintenance of hormonal balance in males and females;
11. Markedly higher levels of brainwave disturbance in the alpha, theta, and delta wave signal patterns of persons exposed to microwave emission fields, and;
12. Because of this brainwave disturbance, negative psychological effects were noted, including loss of memory, loss of ability to concentrate, suppressed emotional threshold, deceleration of intellective processes, and interruptive sleep episodes in a statistically higher percentage of individuals subjected to continual range emissive field effects of microwave apparatus, either in cooking apparatus or in transmission stations.
Take a look around you at every person that still uses a microwave. The largest majority are unhealthy and overweight. The more you use the microwave, the worse your nutritional state gets, and the more likely you are to be diagnosed with various diseases and put on pharmaceuticals which, of course, will create other health problems that lead to a grand spiraling nosedive of health. 

Of all the natural substances -- which are polar -- the oxygen of water molecules reacts most sensitively. This is how microwave cooking heat is generated -- friction from this violence in water molecules. Structures of molecules are torn apart, molecules are forcefully deformed, called structural isomerism, and thus become impaired in quality. This is contrary to conventional heating of food where heat transfers convectionally from without to within. Cooking by microwaves begins within the cells and molecules where water is present and where the energy is transformed into frictional heat.

The following is a summary of the Russian investigations published by the Atlantis Raising Educational Center in Portland, Oregon:

- Microwaving prepared meats sufficiently to insure sanitary ingestion caused formation of d-Nitrosodienthanolamines, a well-known carcinogen.

- Microwaving milk and cereal grains converted some of their amino acids into carcinogens. 

- Thawing frozen fruits converted their glucoside and galactoside containing fractions into carcinogenic substances. 

- Extremely short exposure of raw, cooked or frozen vegetables converted their plant alkaloids into carcinogens. 

- Carcinogenic free radicals were formed in microwaved plants, especially root vegetables. 

Russian researchers also reported a marked acceleration of structural degradation leading to a decreased food value of 60 to 90% in all foods tested. Among the changes observed were: 

- Deceased bio-availability of vitamin B complex, vitamin C, vitamin E, essential minerals and lipotropics factors in all food tested. 

- Various kinds of damaged to many plant substances, such as alkaloids, glucosides, galactosides and nitrilosides. 

According to Dr. Lee, changes are observed in the blood chemistries and the rates of certain diseases among consumers of microwaved foods. The symptoms above can easily be caused by the observations shown below. The following is a sample of these changes:
a.. Lymphatic disorders were observed, leading to decreased ability to prevent certain types of cancers.
b.. An increased rate of cancer cell formation was observed in the blood.
c.. Increased rates of stomach and intestinal cancers were observed.
d.. Higher rates of digestive disorders and a gradual breakdown of the systems of elimination were observed.
Decrease in Food Value

Microwave exposure caused significant decreases in the nutritive value of all foods researched. The following are the most important findings:
1. A decrease in the bioavailability [capability of the body to utilize the nutriment] of B-complex vitamins, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, essential minerals and lipotropics in all foods;
2. A loss of 60-90% of the vital energy field content of all tested foods;
3. A reduction in the metabolic behavior and integration process capability of alkaloids [organic nitrogen based elements], glucosides and galactosides, and nitrilosides;
4. A destruction of the nutritive value of nucleoproteins in meats;

5. A marked acceleration of structural disintegration in all foods.

How Do You Heat Your Food The Healthy Way 
This is kind of a misnomer because there is truthfully, with perhaps the exception of dehydration, no way to heat food and maintain its structural and nutritional value. However, gently heating food in a cast iron pan over the stove may be the healthiest alternative to nuking it. This is the old fashioned way and it never failed our ancestors. 

Toss that microwave and strive to consume at least half of your diet from raw foods, that is a huge step in the right direction to maintain their nutritional value. My mother always used to tell me that if food comes from a package, or has to be heated to be eaten, there's a good a chance it's low in nutrition. She was right for the most part, so keep that in mind when venturing the aisles at the grocery. 

Sources:eutimes.net
hungerforhealth.com

Marco Torres is a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention, environmental toxins and health policy.

clarke_northern_ireland_response

clarke_northern_ireland_response


Mr. McCann,

 Thank you for your response to my query to the Home Office and Minister Theresa May regarding the circumstance surrounding the incarceration of Mr. Stephen Clarke in a Belfast psychiatric unit.

 I am sorry that the responsibility for responding has reverted to you and I accept that clinical queries must be addressed by qualified individuals.

 The fundamental question, fundamental to democracy and sidestepped by Minister May, is twofold.

 If Mr. Clarke violated an ordinance or law, why was he not taken to court to address the alleged offense? Secondly, by what authority or law are the police tasked with delivering an individual directly to a psychiatric facility without the defendant being given the opportunity of being heard in court?

 It is not Mr. Clarke or his actions that are under question, it is the legality of the process,  thus your response is an exercise in dissembling the question and composing answers that, while related, are not central to the legality of Mr. Clarke's placement by police in a psychiatric unit.

 Why was Mr. Clarke not charged with an offense, heard in court and sentenced?

 Essentially, Mr. Clarke's protest was / is against exposure of his children to microwave radiation in the classroom. Where have the police, a judge, the Minister, civil servants, legal representatives or the medical establishment addressed the issue of wi-fi in the classroom?

 Please cite the legal precedent and specific laws giving police the authority to act as they have in this case.

Respectfully,

John Weigel
Republic of Ireland

Critique of National Association for Independent Schools Statement

(From Camilla Rees)

Critique of National Association for Independent Schools Statement


08.09.2014 by emily Category Electromagnetic Health Blog

A Critique of the National Association of Independent School’s One Page Statement, “Non-Ionizing Radiation: Literature Review” (June 2014) Regarding the Potential for Biological and Health Effects to Children from Wireless Radiation Transmitters (WiFi) in Schools
In June 2014, a statement was issued by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) in Washington, D.C. which was clearly intended to reassure schools about the safety of WiFi. However, NAIS did not mention that several governments around the world are recommending limiting wireless radiation exposure to children, and banning WiFi in schools, or that teachers unions representing hundreds of thousands of teachers are questioning the safety of WiFi, and recommending schools be hard-wired.

SNIP

A professional comprehensive review of the peer-reviewed literature would paint an entirely different picture of the risks to children from wireless technologies than this 1-page NAIS statement conveys, and importantly, would illuminate Radio-Frequency Radiation’s effects on critical physiological functioning necessary for children’s successful performance in school.

SNIP

Read the post here.