Poor Diet to Blame for almost Half of Cardio Vascular Deaths

Researchers say that a poor diet contributes to more than 415,000 deaths from CVD in the U.S.

It is well established that a poor diet can raise the risk of cardiovascular death. New research, however, sheds light on the leading dietary risk factors for death from cardiovascular disease, as well as how many cardiovascular deaths these risk factors equate to.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is an umbrella term for conditions that affect the heart and
blood vessels. These include heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), CVD is the leading cause of death across the globe. In 2012, CVD was the cause of around 17.5 million global deaths, accounting for around 31 percent of all deaths that year.

How does diet contribute to the burden of CVD death in the United States?
Dr. Ashkan Afshin, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and colleagues sought to answer this question with their new study.



Results were recently presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health 2017 Scientific Sessions, held in Portland, OR.

“Almost half of CVD deaths could be prevented with a healthful diet”

The researchers used data from a variety of global sources to reach their findings, including 1990-2012 data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and food availability data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The team then looked at the number of CVD deaths that occurred in the U.S. in 2015 and used a systematic approach to quantify how certain dietary factors contributed to these deaths.
The researchers calculated that both a lack of healthful foods and high intake of unhealthful foods contributed to more than 415,000 CVD deaths in the U.S. in 2015. Of these deaths, more than 222,000 occurred in men and more than 193,000 occurred in women.



The team found that low intake of nuts and seeds and a low intake of vegetables were the two leading dietary risk factors for CVD death, accounting for 11.6 percent and 11.5 percent of deaths, respectively.

A low intake of whole grains accounted for 10.4 percent of CVD deaths, while excess salt intake was responsible for around 9 percent of CVD deaths.

Dr. Afshin and colleagues say that their findings show that adopting a healthful diet could help to save tens of thousands of lives every year.

"Low intake of healthy foods such as nuts, vegetables, whole grains, and fruits combined with higher intake of unhealthy dietary components, such as salt and trans-fat, is a major contributor to deaths from cardiovascular disease in the United States.

Our results show that nearly half of cardiovascular disease deaths in the United States can be prevented by improving diet."
Source: Written by Honor Whiteman

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The Forth Industrial Revolution

The Oxford Martin School predicts 47% of current jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots in the next 25 years. In the film, Blackwell and Walsh identify certain key industries likely to be threatened by automated disruption and come up with the approximate figure of 500 million people who will soon be made redundant.

Typically, these statistics are a launching pad for people to speculate about how humanity will find meaning in a world without labour. Although the film does tackle these questions, it also encourages viewers to think about what will happen to the half-billion-odd workers facing sudden redundancy.

“We saw all these futurists, some of them very articulate and very successful but we found they were just becoming too excited without thinking about the global repercussions on very fragile infrastructures in developing countries,” Blacknell says.

On this point, the Rise of the Robots author, Martin Ford, is especially prescient. Contrary to many of his fellow interviewees, he argues that technology alone offers no solution to the problems of massive job displacement.

Ford believes addressing the challenge will require social and political will to push the boundaries of capitalism – and although the idea of a universal basic income isn’t explicitly mentioned (it’s to be the subject of Blacknell and Walsh’s next film), it does serve as
the backdrop to much of the discussion.

The film-makers decided to intersperse interview footage with archival
footage, much of it in black and white. This helps to place contemporary questions about work in a deeper historical context.



Indeed there have been moments in the past when the rapid expansion of technology has both excited and terrified us. At the 1889 Paris Exhibition, guild artisans were invited to marvel at new labour-saving devices which, as the artisans quickly realized, would destroy their way of life and most likely leave them destitute. Whether they endured or not isn’t easily determined, though several interviewees acknowledge the enormous job displacement that occurred in this period.

Of course, there are strong moral arguments for progress, and Blacknell and Walsh don’t deny the potential benefits. But while The Future of Work and Death encourages viewers to look toward the leading edge of research, it also strongly advises us to keep the other eye on
what’s happening right now.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s important on a global scale?” Walsh says. “I think it’s important to focus on the trailing edge [those in poverty] a little bit if you’re going to move forward at such pace.”

This is perhaps more significant in the discussion of death. The documentary includes a quote from Bill Gates: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB [affecting impoverished communities] for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”
When the documentary turns to mortality and humanity’s attempt to conquer death through longevity, the discussion of what the future is likely to look like gets even more opaque.



The film explores two different models of longevity: the attempt to conquer ageing, championed by the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and the project of digitally uploading human consciousness so our minds can live on without our bodies.

The unifying tenet behind these approaches is the philosophy of transhumanism, a movement that aims to reject the physical and intellectual limitations of humanity in favour of something greater. Given death is humanity’s greatest limitation, the holy grail of transhumanism is immortality.

The anthropologist Ernest Becker believed human life was defined by its avoidance of death – a theme the anthropologists Joanna Cook and Steve Fuller and the writer Will Self explore at length in the documentary. Becker also believed humans strived for immortality, though he thought we were more likely to achieve it through what we created. Instead of actual immortality, Becker believed humans undertake “immortality projects” to be remembered once they’re gone.
There’s a striking coincidence here: at the same time that humanity seeks genuine immortality, we’ve begun to phase out work – the attempt to fuse our labour with the world to create something new – perhaps the most common immortality project we’ve created.



The irony here is that the transhumanist desire to overcome humanity is motivated by perhaps the most deeply entrenched human instinct there is: survival. The transhumanists claim it is their zeal for life that motivates them.

Chesterton’s words again come to mind. “When men have come to the edge of a precipice,” he says, “it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in
progress.”

Who the optimists and the pessimists are in the fight for humanity’s future remains to be seen, but The Future of Work and Death lends both a soapbox on which to state their case. And as technology takes us closer to either utopia or the cliff, the film helps along a conversation we desperately need to have.
Source: The Guardian news

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The Neurotoxicity Of Vaccines

By: Alexandria Addesso

Illness is something no one wants to suffer from. Over-the-counter, prescription drugs, and holistic treatments are vigorously sought after to alleviate the slightest form of suffering. In the past hundred years vaccinations have become commonplace when trying to combat both deadly diseases and common ailments. Yet there has been a movement against vaccinations springing up in the last two decades.

Of all vaccinations the flu shot has become the most common and the most frequently administered vaccine being that people usually get one annually at the onset of the flu season. It is well known that if a person already has a compromised immune system at the time of receiving the shot they are highly likely to become very ill. Another controversial and alarming aspect about the flu shot is the high amounts of mercury it contains. Recent lab tests conducted by the Natural News Forensic Food Lab found that seasonal flu vaccines contain 25 thousand times more mercury than is legally allowed in drinking water. Mercury is one of the most toxic metals, it is also particularly neurotoxic. Mercury is known to penetrate and damage the blood-brain barrier very rapidly, leading to a dysfunction of the blood-brain barrier system. Women who are pregnant are usually told to abstain from seafood due to it containing mercury, yet they are encouraged to receive a flu shot as well as other high-risk groups such as children and the elderly.



The flu shot is not the only vaccination known to be neurotoxic, nearly all the vaccines we often push on newborns and infants are. For quite some time autism has been seen to be directly linked to newborn and infantile vaccinations, yet many try to argue the opposite despite autism being almost completely unheard of before mass vaccination programs were initiated in Western nations.

"Dyslexia, minimal brain damage, ADD, autism, allergies, visual and many other neurologic diseases grouped together as ‘developmental disabilities, ’barely existed before mass vaccination programs,” said Dr. Ted Koren. “Probably twenty percent of American children, one youngster in five-suffers from, a 'developmental disability.' This is a stupefying figure developmental disabilities are nearly always generated by encephalitis. And the primary cause of encephalitis in the United States and other industrialized countries is the childhood vaccination program.”

What is most alarming about the childhood vaccination program is that it is a major requirement for public schooling, only sometimes avoided by citing religious belief. A quick Google search can uncover a stories of parents telling stories of how their babies had febrile seizure right after inoculations, some numerous times. Yet their first-hand accounts, either go unheard or purposely silenced. Their previously healthy babies having life-long neurological disorders afterwards.



As people we cannot submit to the state’s demands simply because we are threatened. The youth or other high-risk groups can no longer be a sacrificial offering. Stay curious
and keep questioning everything.

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