How many sodas have you had today? How about your kids? The average American drinks an estimated 56 gallons of soft drinks each year, but before you grab that next can of soda, consider this: one can of soda has about 10 teaspoons of sugar, 150 calories, 30 to 55 mg of caffeine, and is loaded with artificial food colors and sulphites.

This is an alarming amount of sugar, calories and harmful additives in a product that has absolutely no nutritional value. Plus, studies have linked soda to osteoporosis, obesity, tooth decay and heart disease. Despite this, soda accounts for more than one-quarter of all drinks consumed in the United States.

Teenagers and children, who many soft drinks are marketed toward, are among the largest consumers. In the past 10 years, soft drink consumption among children has almost doubled in the United States. Teenage boys now drink, on average, three or more cans of soda per day, and 10 percent drink seven or more cans a day. The average for teenage girls is more than two cans a day, and 10 percent drink more than five cans a day.

While these numbers may sound high, they’re not surprising considering that most school hallways are lined with vending machines that sell, of course, soft drinks. It’s not uncommon for schools to make marketing deals with leading soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola from which they receive commissions–based on a percentage of sales at each school–and sometimes a lump-sum payment.

The revenues are used for various academic and after-school activities, but what activity could be worth devastating the students’ health, which is exactly what consuming all that soda is doing? Getting rid of vending machines in schools–or replacing their contents with pure water and healthy snacks–could make a big difference, as vending machines can increase the consumption of sweetened beverages by up to 50 or more cans of soda per student per year.

Let’s take a look at some of the major components of a can of soda:

• Phosphoric Acid: May interfere with the body’s ability to use calcium, which can lead to osteoporosis or softening of the teeth and bones. Phosphoric acid also neutralizes the hydrochloric acid in your stomach, which can interfere with digestion, making it difficult to utilize nutrients.
• Sugar: Soft drink manufacturers are the largest single user of refined sugar in the United States. It is a proven fact that sugar increases insulin levels, which can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, premature aging and many more negative side effects. Most sodas include over 100 percent of the RDA of sugar.
• Aspartame: This chemical is used as a sugar substitute in diet soda. There are over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders and epilispsy/seizures. Further, when aspartame is stored for long periods of time or kept in warm areas it changes to methanol, an alcohol that converts to formaldehyde and formic acid, which are known carcinogens.
• Caffeine: Caffeinated drinks cause jitters, insomnia, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, elevated blood cholesterol levels, vitamin and mineral depletion, breast lumps, birth defects, and perhaps some forms of cancer.
• Tap Water: I recommend that everyone avoid drinking tap water because it can carry any number of chemicals including chlorine, trihalomethanes, lead, cadmium, and various organic pollutants. Tap water is the main ingredient in bottled soft drinks.
• Soda is one of the main reasons, nutritionally speaking, why many people suffer health problems. Aside from the negative effects of the soda itself, drinking a lot of soda is likely to leave you with little appetite for vegetables, protein and other food that your body needs.

If you are still drinking soda, stopping the habit is an easy way to improve your health. Pure water is a much better choice. If you must drink a carbonated beverage, try sparkling mineral water.

A remarkable study published in the Cochrane Library found no evidence of benefit for influenza vaccinations and also noted that the vast majority of trials were inadequate.

The authors stated that the only ones showing benefit were industry-funded. They also pointed out that the industry-funded studies were more likely to be published in the most prestigious journals…and one more thing: They found cases of severe harm caused by the vaccines, in spite of inadequate reporting of adverse effects.

The study, “Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults”, is damning of the entire pharmaceutical industry and its minions, the drug testing industry and the medical system that relies on them.

In the usual manner of understatement, the authors concluded:

The results of this review seem to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure. As healthy adults have a low risk of complications due to respiratory disease, the use of the vaccine may be only advised as an individual protection measure against symptoms in specific cases.

The Study

The authors attempted to find and investigate every study that has evaluated the effects of flu vaccines in healthy adults aged 18-65. To this end, they “searched Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library, 2010, issue 2), MEDLINE (January 1966 to June 2010) and EMBASE (1990 to June 2010).” They included 50 reports. Forty of them were clinical trials adding up to over 70,000 people. Two reported only on harmful effects and were not included in this study.

Studies of all types of influenza vaccines were included: live, attenuated, and killed – or fractions of killed – vaccines.

The primary outcomes they looked for were numbers and seriousness of influenza and influenza-like illnesses. They also looked at the number and seriousness of harms from the vaccines. The authors attempted to collect missing data by writing to the authors. They describe the response as “disappointing”. In the end, they included 50 studies and refused to use 92, mostly because of highly significant flaws, such as using inappropriate controls, not being randomly controlled trials, inconsistencies in data presented, lack of study design, unclear definitions, poor reporting, lack of crude data, and lack of placebo.

The authors found that vaccines administered parenterally, that is, outside the digestive tract, usually meaning by injection, reduced influenza-like symptoms by 4%. They found no evidence that vaccination prevents viral transmission! (There goes the whole herd immunity argument!) They also found no evidence that they prevent complications, either.

They attempted to ascertain the degree of complications, and though they did report on some, most of the studies simply did not address the issue or did so inadequately.

Five Myths to Keep in Mind About Flu Vaccines

Myth 1: The Flu Shot is very effective.
Statistically, you are less likely to get the flu if you haven’t had a flu vaccine. A BCTV reporter in Vancouver, commenting on the overload in BC emergency rooms, said that out of 32 people who had received a flu shot, 30 got the flu.

Myth 2: The Flu Shot has a high success rate.
This is a vaccine that only has a 6.25% success rate. This is a pretty big under-achievement, considering that the average reaction to placebo injections of distilled water is 30%.

Myth 3: The Flu Shot is safe.
Hugh Fudenberg MD, who is the world’s leading immunogeneticist, says that if a person had 5 flu vaccinations between 1970 and 1980 he/she is 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease than if he/she had only one or two shots. Fudenberg said that this was because of the aluminum and mercury, which almost every flu vaccine contains. The gradual accumulation of aluminum and mercury in the brain leads to cognitive dysfunction.

Myth 4: There are no harmful ingredients in vaccinations.
Flu vaccines consist primarily of 3 categories of ingredients. First there are viruses and cultured bacteria. The second ingredient is the way in which they can be cultivated. This includes aborted human fetal cells, chick embryos, pig blood, monkey kidney tissue, cowpox pus, and calf serum, and all of these foreign proteins get injected straight into your bloodstream. A bit repulsive just thinking about it, isn’t it? The flu shot also contains neutralizers, stabilizers, carrying agents and preservatives such as mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is something that is used for embalming the dead and is known to cause cancer. There is no amount of formaldehyde considered safe when injected into a living organism.

Myth 5: The Flu Shot works.
The flu shot could actually weaken your immune system and make you more likely to catch this virus. It has absolutely no value and should probably be avoided for your own safety. Not only is it loaded with toxic chemicals, but many people actually get the flu shortly after getting the shot, because it weakens their immune system instead of making it stronger like it is claimed to do.

Dr. Viera Scheibner, arguably one of the world’s most respected scientists and scholars on vaccine medical data stated from her research and writings on vaccine science and history: “Ever since the turn of the (last) century, medical journals published dozens and dozens of articles demonstrating that injecting vaccines (can) cause anaphylaxis, meaning harmful, inappropriate immunological responses, which is also called sensitization. (This) increase(s) susceptibility to the disease which the vaccine is supposed to prevent, and to a host of related and other unrelated infections.”

“We see it in vaccinated children within days, within two or three weeks. (Most of them) develop runny noses, ear infections, pneumonitis, (and) bronchiolitis. It is only a matter of degrees, which indicates immuno-suppression, (not immunity). It indicates the opposite. So I never use the word immunization because that is false advertising. It implies that vaccines immunize, which they don’t. The correct term is either vaccination or sensitization.”

In addition, “Vaccines (can) damage internal organs, particularly the pancreas,” so everyone vaccinated, including for seasonal flu, is vulnerable to contracting severe “autoimmune diseases like diabetes,” Addison’s Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Guillian-Barre Syndrome, Hepatitis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Osteoporosis, Polio, and dozens of others.

Some can kill. Others produce a lifetime of disability and pain because autoimmune disease happens when the “body attacks itself,” or more accurately “is attacked” by an unhealthy lifestyle, stress, and various harmful ingestible substances; that is, toxins in drugs, food, air, water, and other liquids. According to immunologist, Dr. Jesse Stoff, human health is compromised four ways:

– by poor nutrition;
– man-made environmental toxins;
– disease-causing organisms and their toxins; and
– immune system trauma from factors like x-ray radiation and stress.

Other factors include a lack of sleep and exercise, smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, and various excesses that throw the body out of balance, making it susceptible to a host of debilitating illnesses.

Conclusions
The Cochrane study found very little evidence to support even a small improvement in time off work. Even that finding needs to be put into the context of industry influence. The authors wrote:

This review includes 15 out of 36 trials funded by industry (four had no funding declaration). An earlier systematic review of 274 influenza vaccine studies published up to 2007 found industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size. Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines. The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding.

“…industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies…”

“…reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin…”

“…there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions…”

Most assuredly, the “content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding”!

Even without taking into account the shoddiness of the studies in general, the authors were still hard put to find any benefit of any sort for influenza vaccinations in healthy people. At best, they found a small decrease in number of days off work. They did not find that the vaccinations had any benefit whatsoever in complications or mortality.

In spite of the limited reporting on adverse effects, the authors did find some, including 1.6 Guillain-Barré cases per million.

The question that must be asked is: How can influenza vaccinations be justified when there is virtually no benefit—not even the oft-cited dubious herd-immunity—and cases of severe harm are documented, in spite of disgustingly limited reporting of adverse effects?

It is long past time to end the travesty of jabbing adults and children without a shred of evidence showing real benefit in spite of trying to find it, and with evidence of crippling harm, in spite of trying to mask it.

Most of them share a common underlying theme — adrenal burnout. It‘s the result of racing through life with a constantly aroused sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system.

In the heightened nervous state of adrenal burnout, the body overproduces adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones. Eventually, this causes the adrenal glands, the front line in the stress reaction, to show wear and tear and become depleted. This frequently leads to an impairment in the thyroid gland, which can cause a further decline in energy level and mood and is one of the reasons why so many women have thyroid glands that don‘t work to their full potential.

Fortunately, you can help reverse this problem by making a few simple lifestyle changes:

Eat steadily, all day long. Skipping meals is one of the worst things you can do for your body. When you‘re hungry, your blood sugar drops, stressing your adrenal glands and triggering your sympathetic nervous system. That causes light-headedness, cravings, anxiety and fatigue.

Skipping breakfast is particularly bad, as it is a sure fire way to gain, not lose, weight. If you start each morning with a good breakfast and “graze” healthfully every two to four hours, your “metabolic flame” will burn evenly all day and your blood sugar won‘t take any sharp dips. You‘ll feel more rested and energetic.

Another drawback to skipping meals: The resulting low blood sugar can slow the speed at which you process information and shorten your attention span .

Eat More Raw Uncooked Food. Stopping at McDonald’s for breakfast is the way most American‘s eat breakfast, but this will not allow you to receive the maximum energy that uncooked food stores. Raw vegetables, fruits, and even raw eggs may take some getting used to, but they are an inexpensive way to increase the amount of uncooked protein and fat in your diet. And forget the myths of their great risk in eggs: the risk of salmonella from raw eggs is only 1 in 30,000, and even that risk can be greatly avoided by carefully examining the eggs prior to eating them.

• Use Psychological Acupressure Techniques to Lower Your Stress.
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a powerful but easy technique for quickly resolving emotional distress. It can even relieve physical complaints such as chronic pain, allergic symptoms, and much more. Not only does it do this quickly, but it works without forcing yourself or the recipient to repeatedly re-experience the negative emotional state. This treatment is generally permanent, relatively easy to apply, boasts a higher than 80% success rate and is free of negative side effects.

• • See the free 25 page manual on EFT at www.mercola.com that provides an overview and clear instructions on how you can use this valuable tool to:
  • • • Remove Negative Emotions
      • Reduce Food Cravings
      • Reduce or Eliminate Pain
      • Implement Positive Goals

Pay off your sleep debt. During sleep your adrenal glands are restored and repaired. Unfortunately, most of us place little value on sleep, and end up getting less than we need, night after night. Result: Your adrenal glands stay depleted.

The average person needs six to eight hours of sleep each night. Sleeping under six hours will actually accelerate aging and increase your risk of diabetes. If you feel as if you‘re dragging, you need the full eight hours of sleep..

For better sleep:

• Avoid before-bed snacks, particularly grains and sugars. This will raise blood sugar and inhibit sleep. Later, when blood sugar drops too low (hypoglycemia), you might wake up and not be able to fall back asleep.

• Sleep in complete darkness or as close as possible. When light hits the eyes, it disrupts the circadian rhythm of the pineal gland and production of melatonin and seratonin. There also should be as little light in the bathroom as possible if you get up in the middle of the night.

• No TV right before bed. Even better, get the TV out of the bedroom or even out of the house, completely. It is too stimulating to the brain and it will take longer to fall asleep. Also disruptive of pineal gland function for the same reason as above.

• Wear socks to bed. Due to the fact that they have the poorest circulation, the feet often feel cold before the rest of the body. Studies have shown that this reduces night wakings.

• Read something spiritual or religious. This will help to relax. Don‘t read anything stimulating, such as a mystery or suspense novel, as this may have the opposite effect. In addition, if you are really enjoying a suspenseful book, you might wind up unintentionally reading for hours, instead of going to sleep.

• Avoid using loud alarm clocks. It is very stressful on the body to be awoken suddenly. If you are regularly getting enough sleep, they should be unnecessary. I gave up my alarm clock five years ago and use a dawn simulator which works by with an alarm to a dimmer switch that gradually turns the light on to full intensity over 45 minutes. I just love it as it is so gentle and if I need more sleep, I get it without being startled or disrupting my adrenals. Almost like a real dawn.

Avoid energy-zappers. A variety of toxins in food and the environment contribute to a heightened adrenal response:…

Consider Vegetable Juicing for Breakfast.

• One of the most common questions people ask me is “What am I supposed to eat for breakfast?” This is because most American breakfasts are a prescription for health disaster. So I developed a green vegetable juicing recipe that seems to help most of my patients regain their energy.

• Sugar. When you eat sugar in any form, it throws your blood sugar out of balance, activating your sympathetic nervous system and causing a variety of other severely disrupting actions to your body.

• Household and self-care products. The vast majority of chemicals found in pesticides and other products, undergo little or no testing for chronic, low level exposures and for chronic health effects. Virtually all household products are now available in natural, nontoxic formulations. Purge your cupboards and medicine chest of chemical-based cleaning products, air fresheners, gardening supplies, shampoos, soaps and deodorants, and find non-chemical alternatives.

In the place of chemical cleaning products, I highly recommend the PerfectClean line of cleaning tools, like the PerfectClean terry cloths and dusters. Due to their ultra-microfiber construction, you can use them with only water (so you eliminate the need for cleaning your home with chemicals) and they clean at a deeper level than any other product you could find out there.

Start by making just a few of the changes defined in the five sections above. You will begin to see major improvements within days. Build on your energy levels and relaxed stress by incorporating more of the changes as you go along, and your adrenal burnout will soon be a distant memory.

The nervous system comprises the brain, the spine and the multitude of nerves throughout the body. The nervous system runs the body. In this respect, it is responsible for making sure the organs within the body do the right things at the right time. It is also responsible for making the body react to external stimulus. It schedules, monitors and makes decisions that keep the body functioning and aware. This is commonly termed homeostasis. As you can imagine this is an extremely complex task that we often tend to take for granted.

If the nervous system was to fail or become damaged a person could lose the ability to walk, talk, feel pain and a whole host of other things. So does stress affect the nervous system, and if so, does it cause it to malfunction ?

The nervous system is different from most of the other systems within the body because it is effectively the monitor of stress for the body. If the nervous system senses that a situation is stressful it causes physiological changes within the body to occur.

Some of these physiological changes include making the heart beat faster, releasing adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, drawing blood away from the stomach and extremities of the body and dilating the pupils of the eyes. This is known as the fight or flight response.

All these changes are necessary for the body in sudden stressful situations but are extremely damaging to the health when they stop being an exception and become the norm. This commonly occurs when the body is experiencing chronic or persistent stress or if the nervous system tells the body that this is the case.

This final point is important because the nervous system also controls how the body reacts after a stressful situation. This is often termed the rest and digest response. Amongst other things, the nervous system reduces the amount of energy hormones in the bloodstream, reduces the heart rate and redirects blood to the stomach and extremities. It is a way of saying everything is ok again, you can start eating again.

If the nervous system is constantly telling the body to be on a state of high alert then it can’t or won’t tell the body to calm down and relax. Ultimately this is dangerous to the health of the body. This is why relaxation techniques such as meditation, yoga and deep breathing are popular methods for convincing the nervous system that everything is ok and that the body can start to relax.

But the results released online Monday are a mixed bag: Some parents were still giving their infants and toddlers these medicines, and many ER cases still involved youngsters who apparently got hold of the medications themselves.

That suggests parents who stopped using them hadn’t discarded old bottles or kept them out of reach after manufacturers voluntarily withdrew medicines labeled for infants and kids up to age 2 in 2007.

The bottom-line message: “Keep all medicines up and away and out of sight,” said Dr. Daniel Budnitz, the study’s senior author and a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Budnitz said the results also indicate the need for better childproof containers.

The study appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Makers of over-the-counter cough and cold medicines voluntarily withdrew the products, mostly syrups, in October 2007. Pediatricians had complained that the products don’t work in young kids and posed a safety risk because of accidental overdoses causing extreme drowsiness, increased heart rate and even some deaths.

The Food and Drug Administration in 2008 warned against using the medicines in children younger than 2; labels now advise against using them in children younger than 4, Budnitz noted.

CDC researchers compared nonfatal ER visits in children younger than 2 with bad reactions to cough and cold medicines in the 14 months before the withdrawal and in the 14 months afterward. A total of 63 nationally representative hospitals were involved.

Extrapolating, the number of visits nationwide linked with cough and cold medicine dropped by more than half, from 2,790 visits to 1,248, the researchers found.

However, two-thirds of the cases before and after involved kids taking medicine on their own.

Dr. Elizabeth Powell, an ER physician at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital, called that result disappointing but said it may have taken a while for parents to get the message “so these things aren’t laying around the house.”

The removal left many parents feeling helpless about relieving their children’s cold symptoms. Powell said parents often bring babies with stuffy noses and other cold symptoms to the emergency room seeking help. She tells them there’s little doctors can do other than suggesting parents remove excess mucous with a bulb device and try acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen for comfort.

– By Lindsey Tanner posted on www.msnbc.com