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In This Issue:
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- Where's the beef?
- From the HelpLine:
Dye-free meds
- Natural food dyes & adulteration
- What doctors are reading
- What doctors read in 1984
- Environment & genetics (autism)
- Searching for a search
- Cookbook II
- Book: Are You in the Zone?
- Coming Event: Sedona, AZ:
Integrative Med/Mental Health
- Getting the arsenic out
- More on fluoride
- Note from a retired volunteer
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Searching for a Search
As some of you have surely noticed, we are missing our Search. We apologize for being searchless, and we have a few people working on getting it back on line, so we thank you for your patience.
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Cookbook II
300 recipes donated by Feingold members - many from the Feingold Members Recipe Board.
In addition, there is a special section with helpful personal care, household, and craft recipes
too.
The book will be available about the middle of August, but you can order it in advance now!
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Are You in the Zone?
This book is for those who experience difficulty understanding how their behavior is seen by others, and for their parents and therapists.
According to a mom on one of the ADHD websites, "I was given a wonderful aid today called Are You in the Zone? ... It had a part for me to read and a part for my son that helped him see how some of the things he does aren't perceived as "normal" by society ... very good. Now when he acts up I can ask him if he is in the zone and he actually stops and thinks about it."
While not on Amazon, you can buy the book at the author's website for $8.95
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Coming Event
FOR PARENTS & HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS
Sedona, AZ
September 17-18
Integrative Medicine for Mental Health
2nd Annual Conference
This conference will focus on causes of mental illnesses such as ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, OCD, and eating disorders.
Topics to be addressed include nutritional deficiencies, immune system dysfunction, intestinal dysbiosis, digestive disorders, metabolic imbalances, allergies, environmental toxins, and infectious conditions.
A comprehensive overview of biological testing, designed to detect underlying health issues that contribute to imbalanced brain chemistry, will be presented and simplified to enhance clinical practice.
More information.
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Getting the
arsenic out
According to the July 1 Mercola newsletter, the US FDA has announced that Pfizer will stop the sale of the animal drug 3-Nitro (Roxarsone) this month. The drug has been used in chicken feed since the 1940's, but the FDA has only recently detected arsenic in the livers of chickens treated with the drug.
3-Nitro is used to help control coccidiosis, a parasitic disease that affects the intestinal tracts of animals, and also to make the chickens gain more weight and have pinker, fresher-looking meat.
A good question might be, "Hey, FDA, what took you so long?" More . . .
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More on Fluoride
I have found an interesting study on Fluoride called Effects of the Fluoride on the Central Nervous System, published last October in Neurologia.
Unfortunately, all but the abstract is in Spanish, and with the help of the computer translator, Babelfish, and my Spanish class from 15 years ago, I have translated it. If you speak Spanish, please don't laugh too much (giggling is okay) and I will be happy to receive any corrections you can provide. Here are the studies:
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Note from a retired volunteer
Judy Schneider retired from active Feingold volunteering several years ago, but Feingold volunteers tend to come back. In response to the recent studies showing an environmental connection to autism, as well as a dietary connection to ADHD, she writes, "I think we should take a moment to remember Dr. Ben Feingold a visionary and pioneer who saw this connection so many years ago, and the hundreds of moms and dads who have helped tens of thousands of families over these 35 years. We stood alone, but persevered. We knew this connection existed, but the medical establishment couldn’t believe a group of moms/dads! Did they miss the memo on Mother/Father Knows Best?"
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Time to
Renew?
If you have not
been receiving Pure Facts, you may have let your subscription lapse.
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If your family has
benefited from the Feingold Program, please remember us when it's time to give
to
charity.
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Where's the beef?
Getting tired of chicken, I thought about a nice roast ... a juicy steak ... some real red meat - with cholesterol - for a change. Not having time for a 15-mile trip to Whole Foods, I figured I could go to nearby WalMart for one roast. After all, we do say right in the Foodlist, "Any fresh or frozen uncured meat or minimally processed poultry may be used."
But that's not what I found in the aisle of good-looking packaged fresh red meat.
The Ribeye Steak, Top Sirloin Steak, and Boneless Chuck Roast claimed to be
"enhanced with six% marinade."
I noticed that "marinade" had no ingredients listed which was scary enough for a Feingolder, but what really made me angry was to see that they spelled out "six%" (less noticeable than 6%). I wonder whose bright idea that was? Well, I kept looking, sure my nice fresh minimally processed roast was in there somewhere.
Top Round, London Broil, Eye of Round, and Rump Roast revealed they were "enhanced" with "eight% marinade." 8%? Besides water, what the heck is in "marinade" anyway?
Finally, I found some cute little circles of Filet Mignon at $9.55 a pound. Surely at that price, it would actually be meat?? Looking closer, however, the Filet Mignon admitted to having "twenty percent lightly seasoned solution" in it.
TWENTY percent? - 20%!!
So $2.00 of every $10.00 I spend would be for salt water? This is worse than in the old days when the butcher might put his thumb on the scale to cheat you by increasing the weight. At least you weren't expected to eat the thumb!! And what, please, besides salt, is in "seasoned solution?"
Never mind; I went home and ate a cheese sandwich.
Surely some supermarkets sell real meat; maybe even some WalMarts do, too (but not mine, apparently).
The Feingold moral of this story is: Look (or even ask) before you buy. Make sure your meat is actually MEAT, not puffed up by solutions or marinades. You don't need the extra salt; you don't want the mystery flavorings; and if you want water in your steak, surely you could add it yourself.
From the HelpLine
Q:
On dye-free medications that have "grape flavoring" or other flavors ... what is the flavoring comprised of? If there is no dye, is the flavoring still made of petroleum? If it is grape or berry, are there any salicylates ...?
A:
The pharmaceutical company can use anything it wants for flavoring . . . natural or not. Mostly not – and if they did use “natural flavoring” they would probably be bragging about it on the label. The artificial flavoring might not be made from petroleum, but it often starts there …… again, there are thousands of flavoring chemicals and no way to know what is included under the word "flavoring." You can try calling the manufacturer, but there is a good chance that they cannot tell you because they just bought something called “flavor” from somebody else.
If you should happen to find something with “natural grape flavoring” there might be some part of a grape actually in there …. Whether that part contains the salicylate chemical is also not known. If your child is quite sensitive to salicylates, you may not want to chance it unless there is no choice.
While some medications are in capsules that can be opened and added to some acceptable food (if it doesn’t taste too terrible and if the doctor says it is okay) … you might do better with a compounding pharmacist for medications you expect to need frequently or if you can wait a day before beginning a prescription. You can find one through the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists.
Natural Food Dyes and Adulteration
"you're almost stupid
if you're not doing it"
- James Griffith, VP of food,
dietary supplement &
excipient standards, USP
There is a perfect storm brewing for increased adulteration of numerous naturally derived food ingredients, and colorants in particular, according to US Pharmacopeia, the standards-setting firm behind the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC).
US Pharmacopeia (USP) is the non-governmental, non-profit authority responsible for setting the standards that make up the FCC, a compendium of ingredient monographs and tests to ensure the quality, purity and safety of more than 1,100 food ingredients.
Speaking to FoodNavigator-USA in mid-June, USP’s director of food standards Markus Lipp, and vice president of food, dietary supplement and excipient standards James Griffith, said that natural ingredients present specific challenges. With increased demand for natural ingredients, the temptation becomes greater for small and medium-sized manufacturers in particular to cut expensive ingredients with cheaper alternatives.
“For colorants, it’s the perfect storm: consumers are demanding it; they’re getting tougher to source,” Griffith said. “The signals are there. There’s a complacent public and an overactive advertising philosophy going with it…There’s so much money that can be made so easily under the radar, you’re almost stupid if you’re not doing it.”
He said that as consumers have become increasingly financially pinched, they have become less choosy about buying trusted brands – yet everyone trusts that foods would not be for sale unless they had met some kind of minimum standard.
Lipp added that if a manufacturer is simply trying to make a cheaper product, that’s fine, as long as ingredients are labeled.
“Everybody in the supply chain should get the quality, or at least the perceived quality, that they paid for,” he said. “…At the end of the line it all needs to be safe. There is an intersection where quality meets safety and that’s where we can provide a third party independently developed set of criteria.”
Well, that's most of the article as it appeared in Food Navigator recently. If all we're going to get is the PERCEIVED quality of natural source food dyes, we're in trouble.
What doctors are reading
Medscape is a newsletter primarily for health professionals and interested consumers. You can register to receive it at www.medscape.com
So, today it was with distinct pleasure that the first article in the collection of "Most Read Articles" for ADHD was:
Elimination Diet May Improve ADHD Symptoms
The article was about the study by Lidy Pelsser, PhD, published earlier this year and covered in our February eNews, and began, "In a group of young children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), nearly two-thirds who followed a restricted elimination diet experienced a significant reduction in ADHD symptoms and oppositional defiant behavior. Going off the diet led to relapse."
Lidy was quoted as saying, "We think that dietary intervention should be considered in all children with ADHD, provided parents are willing to follow a diagnostic restricted elimination diet for a 5-week period and provided expert supervision is available."
Later in the article, Jaswinder Ghuman, MD of the University of Arizona, who had published a commentary on the Lidy study, was quoted as saying that the study was "well-designed and carefully done, showed a benefit with a supervised elimination diet, and provides an additional treatment option for some young children with ADHD."
Dr. Ghuman also noted that elimination diet studies are "complex and challenging." This is true enough -- for studies. Unfortunately, Medscape used that quote as a subheading, tweaking it just slightly, to read "Diet 'Complex and Challenging'" ... this is an unfortunate misquote in an otherwise lovely article, which you can see here. If your doctor happens to quote the heading, you will know what to tell him/her.
What doctors were
reading in 1984
I found the 1984 medical text Current Pediatric Diagnosis & Treatment (8th edition) in a used book store and grabbed it. The book discusses Attention Deficit Disorder and hyperactivity for 3 1/2 pages. At that time, the rate of ADD was only 3% in school-age children.
The authors write that "presumed causes include virtually any illness or trauma occurring before, during, or after birth and affecting the brain either obviously or by implication."
Well, that sure covers a lot of territory.
A nod is given to food colors and preservatives having been recently implicated "as specific precipitants of hyperactivity," and another few sentences suggest the possibility that chronic low-level lead exposure may cause it, citing studies in which newborn rats suckling on milk laced with lead became hyperactive. (Sauerhoff 1973, Kostas 1976)
Checking the index, however, I received a surprise. There is an entry for "Hyperactivity in poisoning." I turned to page 927, in the middle of the 29-page chapter on poisoning, and discovered this sentence:
It is useful to determine the level of coma, degree of hyperactivity, or severity of withdrawal symptoms as a means of assessing the efficacy of treatment.
Symptoms of hyperactivity listed (for mild poisoning) included restlessness, irritability, insomnia, tremor, hyperreflexia (exaggerated reflexes), sweating, mydriasis (dilated pupils), and flushing. It appears to be a matter of type of toxin and degree of exposure. Do any of them sound familiar?
Apparently, poisons can affect the neurons. This is not new -- researchers have known for many years that exposure to toxins will make rats hyperactive; in fact they developed special cages for the purpose of measuring how hyper they get.
Oh my, how many times have we said that for some children, the food dyes and other petrochemical additives act "like a drug" or act "like a poison?" Yet even we feel that it is a bit excessive when moms on some of the message boards scream about the additives "poisoning our children!" But maybe .... just maybe ... they aren't wrong.
Environment Genetics
Three interesting new studies published in the journal Neuron claim that both genetics (DNA) and environment seem to be important to the development of autism, with some argument over which is more important.
They say that autism appears to be caused by hundreds of different gene mutations, many of them spontaneous (new mutations), and they suspect that up to 300 different genes may be ultimately involved - possibly leading to the definition of many more different kinds of autism than currently recognized.
The rate of autism has been rising in the past few decades -- to an alarming 1 in 38 children in South Korea -- and though some scientists believe that greater awareness causes increased diagnosis, others believe certain environmental exposures may be playing a role.
The environmental items so far considered, however, include air pollution, age of the parents, and the weight of the baby at birth. As Elizabeth Cohen admits in the video on CNN Health, this field of study is still "in its infancy."
For example, they know that the rate of autism is increasing, and they know that more parents are having children at an older age. It is suggested, therefore, that being an older parent causes autism - blaming the parents, again. This is a good example of faulty logic. It is similar to saying:
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John was born with big ears;
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John's dad has a donkey, and donkeys have big ears;
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Therefore, owning a donkey causes children to be born with big ears.
Correlation is not causation. Maybe parents eat more ice cream ... watch more TV ... oh, there are any number of things we can "blame" on the parents. Air pollution, of course, is blamed for everything anyway, and considering all the unknown chemicals floating around in our air, that may be a good field of study.
I don't mean to sound critical - we are very excited that the word "environment" has actually been said in the scientific arena of autism research. Hopefully, this awareness will expand into a study of other environmental exposures to toxins, to explore how babies with these varied phenotypes (genetic configurations) react to chemicals they are unwittingly exposed to in their food, their clothes, their bedding, and even their medical care.
Sources: (Passwords when required: myfiles : 4Studies)
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From the Mailbox
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Renewing in NY - "Thank you for all that you do to reveal the truth of the effects that food has on a person...physically and mentally."
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Renewing in MD - "Pure Facts is the best reading material I receive! Thanks."
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From VA - "Thanks for all the good work and so much volunteering.
First did Feingold diet 35 yr ago. Now it is for grandson."
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New member in NJ - "My mother was a member for years to help with my dyslexia/ADD. Now I'm getting it for my 4-year-old son who is showing some signs."
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Email from member - "Hi Shula, Just wanted you to know how much my family appreciates the Feingold program. My two boys, ages 11 and 8, wish that all artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives could be outlawed in the US. We have all benefited so much from Feingold! Thank you"
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New member in SC - "Thank you so much for continuing to believe in this diet and provide information and support for parents! It makes an amazing difference in my children's lives as well as mine!"
Member in Canada ordering brochures - "I am a 53 year old female, who just last year made the connection to salicylates as problematic for me. I would like to assist you in helping others from years of needless suffering. Thank You!"
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Coming in the July-August 2011 PURE FACTS:
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Oh you lucky Feingolders! Some cool new places around the country.
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Big Cola attempts to brainwash dietitians and parents.
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Healthy school food in Colorado.
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Zeroing in on some of the causes of schizophrenia.
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What's the biggest culprit in the obesity crisis?
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A new book for kids with sensory processing issues.
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Should you go organic, and when is conventional okay?
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