The state of North Carolina has its own “Board of Dietetics and Nutrition”–of course it does–and it has decided that one bloggers right to free speech ends where the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition’s officious overbearingness begins, as I think Oliver Wendell Holmes (or was it Oliver Wendell Douglas?) once wrote.

Here’s the naughty bits, as reported in Carolina Journal:

[When] Steve Cooksey…was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.

The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.

Seems he came to their attention after contradicting a local hospital’s director of diabetes services at a local meeting, and handing out cards about his site. What did the Board find objectionable about Cooksey’s site? (Read more)

Beware of snake oil, of course. But this documentary is very inspiring. Also, it points to the evils of state sponsored medicine and science.

They may just be the hardest drugs on the market, if the FDA are to be believed.

A company which sells walnuts has been told they are dealing in drugs because their packaging suggests health benefits which the Food and Drug Administration has not approved, it has been reported.

A fiercely-worded letter from the agency allegedly insisted Diamond Foods, from Stockton, California, remove the health claims or send off for a new drug application if it did not wish to be closed down.

The nut company has been selling its products with packaging which states the omega-3 fatty acids in walnuts have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease and some types of cancer.

But while the claims are backed up by research, including 35 published medical papers supporting assertions that eating walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce risk of heart attacks, the FDA is said to have insisted the company is ‘misbranding’ its foods because the ‘product bears health claims that are not authorised by the FDA’. (Read more)

Wealthy Seniors benefit from medicare:

Just in case you thought the the recent Peter Schiff video I posted was an exaggeration, here is proof. Schiff talked about how condoms and other forms of birth control would be used for all sorts of things once government provided them for “free.”

HAVANA, Cuba — On this island of constant shortages and scarcities, the latex condom has uses that stretch far beyond the bedroom.

At baseball games, concerts and other entertainment events, Cubans blow them up and bat them around the crowd like beach balls. When Cuban parents can’t afford birthday party balloons or can’t find them, they unfurl a few “Vigor” brand prophylactics and start puffing. The latex is so strong and supple that kids can even draw faces on them. . . .

The Cuban government sells the Chinese-made rubbers three-for-a-penny at pharmacies and snack bars, cheap enough for anyone to afford.
(Read more)

Reasons this is pathetic:

1- Aside from prisoners, soldiers are the people over whom the government has the most direct control. They can’t even prevent

2- A fat Army represents the bureaucratization of the military.

3- Gives Michelle Obama more opportunities to talk about obesity as a national security issue.

4- Weight loss injection do NOT need a government subsidy. Any company that develops this stands to make a fucking fortune.

Officials for the US Army are worried that its soldiers are getting to fat and to combat that issue they plan on injecting soldiers with fat.

While it might seem odd to think that fat injections can help soldiers lose weight there are actually two types of fat, the first is white adipose tissue which causes weight gain while the second is brown adipose tissue which actually helps lose weight.

A recent study has found that brown adipose tissue can burn up to 250 calories in a three hour period and even more special is the fact that it uses conventional fat cells to fuel it’s work, burning energy from those cells. The study also found that exercise can help create additional brown fat cells.

Researchers are now attempting to create the brown adipose cells in a laboratory at which point they will be injected into overweight soldiers.

If you aren’t in the Army and you want weight loss injections you might be in luck, a Boston-based company is already working on a commercial treatment.

In the Army’s researcher note in which they granted money to examine the use of brown adipose tissue they wrote:

“Obesity and its associated metabolic complications…are becoming increasingly prevalent in military personnel. Increasing [brown fat] by about 50 grams in obese patients could induce strong weight loss and improve metabolic status.”

If all goes as planned researchers will isolate brown adipose progenitor cells which they will then use to generate new adipose cellsin the lab. If all goes as planned soldiers will receive “transplantation therapy” to shed their extra pounds. (Read more)

Interesting interactive maps, trends, state ranking can be found here.

TOKYO, Japan — In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law.

So before the fat police could throw her in pudgy purgatory, Miki Yabe, 39, a manager at a major transportation corporation, went on a crash diet last month. In the week before her company’s annual health check-up, Yabe ate 21 consecutive meals of vegetable soup and hit the gym for 30 minutes a day of running and swimming.

“It’s scary,” said Yabe, who is 5 feet 3 inches and 133 pounds. “I gained 2 kilos [4.5 pounds] this year.”

In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

In the United States, the Senate and House health care reform bills have included the so-called “Safeway Amendment,” which would offer reductions in insurance premiums to people who lead fitter lives. The experience of the Japanese offers lessons in how complicated it is to legislate good health.

Though Japan’s “metabo law” aims to save money by heading off health risks related to obesity, there is no consensus that it will. Doctors and health experts have said the waistline limits conflict with the International Diabetes Federation’s recommended guidelines for Japan. Meantime, ordinary residents have been buying fitness equipment, joining gyms and popping herbal pills in an effort to lose weight, even though some doctors warn that they are already too thin to begin with. (Read more)

A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit that claims the CIA used U.S. veterans as human guinea pigs in Cold War-era drug experiments.
Vietnam Veterans of America filed a class action against the Army and CIA in 2009, claiming that at least 7,800 soldiers had been used as guinea pigs in Project Paperclip.
Soldiers were allegedly administered at least 250 and as many as 400 types of drugs, among them Sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.
Using tactics it often attributed to the Soviet enemy, the U.S. government sought drugs to control human behavior, cause confusion, promote weakness or temporary loss of hearing and vision, induce hypnosis and enhance a person’s ability to withstand torture, according to the complaint.
The veterans say that some soldiers died, and others suffered seizures and paranoia. They say the CIA knew it had to conceal the tests from “enemy forces” and the “American public in general” because the knowledge “would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission.”

. . . .

The parties disputed the number of claims at issue. While the CIA claimed the “secrecy oath” claim is the only one remaining, the veterans say the government had an obligation to notify them of the drugs’ effects and provide them health care. (Read more from )

History of Canada’s national healthcare

Doctor protests accompanied Canada’s first imposition of government control in Saskatchewan, and the initial nationalization in 1962. The socialists overcame the protests by buying off doctors who, in protest, had closed their offices for 23 days.

The eugenecists who promoted it.

Thomas Douglas, who nationalized Canada’s healthcare, advocated moral and psycological screenings for marriage and sterilization for unfit individuals. There was a sterilization statute in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.

Canadian system remains overwhelmingly popular.

Since it is illegal to use prices to reduce demand. The only available system for rationing is queue-ing. Median wait time between referral by general practioner to treatment in 2010 was 18.2 weeks. It varied by specialty and province.

The longest was for orthopedic surgery was 36.7 weeks.

In New Brunswick, the worst offender, median was 24.6 weeks.

The Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged the wait for knee replacements is often over a year, and that many patients die on waiting lists for cardiac care.

Physicians get paid according to how many patients they see. As a result, is common to double and triple book.

The average wait times for human access to
ultra sound — 31 days
ct scan — 30 days
mri — 69 days
pet scans — completely unavailable

The average wait times for animal access to
ct scans — a few hours
mri — a few hours

In 2008, Forbes magazine: there were more MRIs in Pittsburg than in Canada.

Despite this, there was opposition to a group of doctors attempting to set up private MRI clinics because they didn’t want anybody “jumping the queue.”

After the first private MRI clinic opened in 1993, Prime Minister Jean Chretien vowed to end funding to any province which allowed such private clinics to continue existing. Thomas Douglas’s CCF and the union of public employees led the opposition.

More seriously ill patients have a harder time finding an acute care hospital bed in Canada than moderately ill patients because of perverted incentives which put emphasis on cost.

To control costs, government attempts to restrict the number of Canadian doctors contributing to the doctor shortage.

Despite this, their system remains popular. Substantial propaganda contributes to this.

t’s a conspiracy plot straight out of a spy novel: on Monday, the Guardian reported that as part of the Osama Bin Laden capture effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a fake vaccination clinic in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to collect DNA from Bin Laden’s children. The idea was to look for a match with DNA from Bin Laden’s sister, who died in early 2010 in Boston, to verify that the Bin Laden family was in the compound before attacking. It’s not clear whether the ploy worked; the CIA isn’t talking. (Read more from news.sciencemag.org)

Recommend starting at 13:10!

2:00 — Dr. Burgess explains his “awakening”: Two tier systems developed in many countries with nationalized healthcare. Clintons were fearful of this, so they sought to criminalize any practice of medicinie outside their system.

13:10 — Dr. Orient describes working for the VA: Very bad idea to work too hard because you don’t get paid more, everyone resents you, and there is a greater possibility of making a mistake. Weekends and Federal holidays all free! No need for malpractice insurance. Eligibility for treatment rigidly pre-determined. Can’t critizise the government.

At the VA’s monthly administrative meeting a nurse suggested playing a recording of last week’s meeting and going to the canteen instead.

(Dr. Orient’s whole talk is outstanding)

25:40 — Dr. Amerling

27:00 — more and more residents are trying to stay on instead of enter private practice. There’s a mass migration from established private practices into hospital. This is driven by money. Practice expenses are rising while medicare / medicade payments are not rising with inflation.

32:00 — wonderful anecdote about the consequences of doctors working at fixed salary regardless of how many patients they see.

Obamacare penalizing hospitals for patient re-admittence.

Federal guide lines are driven by medical industry lobbies which always advocate aggressive treatment. In 2006 guidelines for anemic patients were written based on casual observation. This was dramatically refuted by more rigorous experiments. Patients were harmed.

46:00 — Q & A