How Your Health is Threatened

Pharmaceutical Pollution: What it is, and How Pharmaceutical Pollution Threatens Your Health-
by web site Six Wise.com

Americans are prescribed millions of doses of prescription drugs every year. Livestock are given millions more. But after the pill has been swallowed or the injection taken, the active components of the drugs do not become inert or completely absorbed by the body.

Far from disappearing, the drugs are excreted and now, scientists are finding, prescription drugs are showing up in our ground water, soil, waterways and even our drinking water. That's because our conventional sewage treatments may not be looking for drugs, and certainly don't always remove them. Adding to the problem are prescription drugs that aren't used, then are flushed down the toilet or deposited in landfills -- ultimately ending up in the environment.
This so-called "pharmaceutical pollution" could have major implications on wildlife, agriculture and humans -- yet is only beginning to be studied.
"This is an important new research area," said A. Lynn Roberts, leader of a Johns Hopkins team that began a study to determine the scope of pharmaceutical pollution in the United States. Roberts continued:
"Over the past few years, scientists in Europe have found pharmaceuticals in natural waterways, sewage treatment effluents and even in drinking water. Yet until this year [2003] there have been virtually no scientific studies examining this issue in the United States. ."

How Widespread is the Problem?
Current estimates are still being gathered, but a study conducted in 1999-2000 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that most waterways contain at least some antibiotics, steroids, synthetic hormones or other common drugs.

Just how many drugs are we using currently? A lot. Here are some statistics just for antibiotics (not including any other types of drugs):

· Humans consume 235 million doses of antibiotics each year.
· Livestock and poultry producers administered more than 21 million pounds of antibiotics to animals in 2004 alone.
When a drug is taken, experts say up to 90 percent may be excreted back into the environment, unchanged.

There is good news, and that is that attention to this issue is growing, and so is the drive to find out just what types of problems may be occurring.
The USGS agrees, stating in their report that "protecting the integrity of our water resources is one of the most essential environmental issues of the 21st century."

Mannatech's cutting edge research on Glyconutrients gives optimal health and wellbeing.

Amazing Migraine Miracle

Article from "Herbs for Health" Prevention Health Books

Who has experienced Migraines?
This amazing alternitive has given relief to many. It stops migraines and may prevent them from coming back!
Migraines affect our lives in many unpleasant ways, causing lost worktime and pleasure, also sleep and exercise. The pain is excruciation and it's often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and extreme sensitivity to light. But now there's a treatment for migraines - a herb that gives relief and also decreases attacks. Feverfew is this wonder herb which prevents constriction the blood vessels in the brain.

It works very well. Three clinical studies have suggested that peoople who took feverfew had less pain, nausea, vomiting and decreased sensitivity to light. Also reduction of the duratiion and frequency of migraine attacks!

A capsule is available which contains freeze-dried feverfew leaves.

It is well to believe some herbal remedies work better than powerful prescription drugs.

Mannatech products are scientifically researched and are glyconutrients essential for acceptional health.

Discussion on Drugs

The World Today - Effectiveness of prescription drugs under dispute
Tuesday, 9 December , 2003 12:44:41
Reporter: Fran Kelly

TREVOR JONES: It is true to say that not everybody responds the same way to every medicine, in the same ways people have different allergies to foods and so on. But the vast majority of drugs work in certainly over 90 per cent of patients, but there are some categories where we don't know enough yet about the disease to know whether all the patients are going to get the benefit.FRAN KELLY: But according to Allen Roses, the statistics are startling. He says that more than 90 per cent of drugs only work in 30 to 50 per cent of the people taking them. Now, that's a massive failure rate.TREVOR JONES: Yes, I couldn't say that I would agree with him on that subject. I feel that all the data I've got, all the research I've seen is that that figure is different to the one I'm aware of.FRAN KELLY: What is the failure rate as far as you're aware of?TREVOR JONES: Well, for many drugs. I mean, for example, for painkillers they work in certainly well over 80 to 90 per cent of patients, and in those 10 per cent they don't work as well, it doesn't mean they don't work, it means you maybe have to take two tablets rather than one.FRAN KELLY: But the reality is the National Health Service, the NHS drug bill is 7.2 billion pounds a year and rising for drugs that, according to Allen Roses – the Vice President of Genetics with GlaxoSmithKline, don't work on most of the people who take them.TREVOR JONE: Well, let's put that in context again. The drugs bill is a very small component of overall spend on heath here, in fact it's only just over 10 per cent.FRAN KELLY: But it has risen, according to the newspaper – 50 per cent and…TREVOR JONES: It has risen much less than the total spend on national health service.FRAN KELLY: In Australia, and I presume it's the same here, the drug companies do work hard on doctors, particularly to prescribe their drugs.TREVOR JONES: Well, we most certainly believe that the doctor can distinguish between what patients need and what patients must have, and what we do is provide the kind of information to them, both in post-graduate seminars, and of course by representative visits, so they can make their own judgement, patient-by-patient of what's the right drug for that person.

Glyconutrients are proven scientifically, produced by Mannatech, and are necessary for optimal health and are one of the most important discoveries over the last century.

Glyconutrients for Nutrition

Glyconutrient breakup.

Chondroitin sulfate Pharmaceutical Grade, is a component of bovine cartilage, and may make fluid of joints more slippery, and help protect cartilage from breaking down. Recent studies verified beneficial effects.Astragalus may strengthen immune response, increase production of white blood cells, fight infection, and may be energizing.Cordyceps, Reishi & Shiitake mushroom extracts contain a number of active agents that are known to modulate function of the immune system in humans. The primary agents include specific polysaccharides - which occur in the form of Beta-D-glucans bound to amino acids, which are known to possess anti cancer properties.Fucoidan consists of glycoproteins and glyconutrients from a super low molecular weight extract of brown seaweed or Limu harvested from pure ocean water. Along with natural sea minerals and other nutrients, fucoidan is made up of fucose, mannose, galactose, and xylose. Fucoidan may help immune function; increase macrophage, T-cell and killer cell activity; inhibit tumor cell growth; normalize blood pressure; and increase resistance to viruses. It may inhibit specific blood clotting factors that can lead to excessive clotting, and it may lower heavy metals, radioactives, cholesterol, and blood sugar due to its alginate content. Fucoidan has been shown to enhance production of the antiaging HGF (Hepatocyte Growth Factor) cytokine.

Glyconutrients are already a proven in science. Pharmaceutical companies are spending miollions to synthetically manufature glyconutrients

Antioxidant Glutathione for Good Vision

Taken from "The Antioxidant Miracle" by Lester Packer, PH.D.

Glutathione was discovered well over a hundred years ago, but it has been only in the past decades that scientists began to understand the crucial role it plays in health. Since high quantities of glutathione are found in the lens of the eye, the early research focused primarilhy on vision. Although glutathione may be critical for good vision, as are other antioxidants, we now know that it performs so many vital roles in the body that it has been dubbed "nature's master antioxidant" by my friend and colleague the late Alton Meister, a well-known authority on glutathione.

Produced in the body, gluytathione is the primary water-soluble antioxidant. In the antioxidant network, glutathione recycles the oxidizaed form of vitamin C, restoring its antioxidant power.

Glutathione is certtainly one of the network's busiest antioxidants. It performs may jobs far and above its role as traditional antioxidants.

Mannatech's product Glyconutrients are high in antioxidents.

Oil Industry and Cancer

Complementary Cancer TherapiesBy Dr. Steve Nugent - President of International Association of Complementary Medicine

As I have stated in my first physicians desk reference (Nugent's Physicians Desk Reference for Applied Clinical Nutrition), "I believe there is an answer for all disease that can be found in nature. It is our mission therefore to work tirelessly until we find all of those answers.
For now however, many answers must still be found through synthetics or surgeries. Eventually with the unprecedented speed at which research is progressing in the areas of phytonutrients and glyconutrients, drugs will be replaced and all doctors who wish to stay in practice will have to learn these new areas of science and patient care. In the meantime however, we need to work together. More than 45% of the U.S. population uses vitamins now. According to the National Cancer Institute, more than 35% of doctors who treat cancer are using some type of alternative therapy as an adjunct to chemotherapy or radiation.
Scientific peer reviewed studies proving the safety and efficacy of natural substances for many areas including cancer have been available for more than 26 years! No medical schools teach that information. Almost no doctors know about the information. This is appalling in the age of communication!

Keep in mind my friends; the second largest money making industry in the world is the cancer industry. That's right, second only to the Oil industry. Cancer is the most serious problem on this planet today! Why isn't the word getting out? Could this be due to scientific myopia? Are the professors and researchers simply unwilling to consider new ideas? Is there a conspiracy to insure that the cancer industry continues to grow and profit? Well, I don't have the answers to these questions and I choose not to speculate on them.

Study of Stress Affecting Health

Findings From the Studies
· Periods of short-term stress triggered the immune system to prepare for injury or infection, similar to a "flight or fright" response
· Long-term stress caused excessive wear on the body and activated a deterioration of the immune system
· The immune systems of the elderly and those already suffering with some kind of illness were less capable of coping with stressful situations
Examples of the Five Stressors Used in the Studies
· Acute time-limited stressors: Stress such as that brought on from speaking in front of large groups of people
· Brief naturalistic stressors: Challenges that occur throughout certain points in a person's life such as taking school exams
· Stressful event sequences: A specific life-changing event such as loss of a loved one in which the stress will eventually subside
· Chronic stressors: Stress induced by an extreme change in lifestyle such as becoming a caregiver for a chronically ill person or becoming permanently disabled from an accident in which there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel
· Distant Stressors: Stress that is the result of a traumatic event from the past that continues to wreak havoc on the immune system such as child abuse or post-traumatic stress experienced by war veterans
Researchers concluded that the stressors that most negatively compromised the immune system were the chronic stressors. Researchers also discovered the longer the duration of stress or perceived length of the stress, the less the body's ability to adapt to the stressful situation. It was determined this kind of stress could lead to serious negative health repercussions beginning with attacking the immune system at the cellular level then going after the overall broader functions of the immune system.

Glyconutrients are generally missing form our diet but necessary for great health.

Sugar that Makes Things Tick

From New Scientist Vol 176 - 2002

The complex sugar molecules that help make living things tick are all built up from simple sugars, or "monosaccharides" such as glucose, and about 10 others. Two ring-shaped monosaccharide molecules can link together to form a disaccharide, the other main building block of complex sugars. Things are made more complex because there are several different ways for the monosaccharides to link together, which leave the two units angled in different directions.
The problem only gets worse as monosaccharide and disaccharide units link together to form polysaccharides, the chains of sugars which in turn form the giant structures of complex sugars. These massive molecules, which can contain more than 200 units, not only come as long chains, but also as intricately branched structures that decorate the surfaces of cells like a forest of sugary filigree. It's the three-dimensional shape of these sugars that is key to their functions, such as cell recognition. And there's a further complication: different atoms or groups of atoms may be attached to the basic monosaccharide molecules, subtly changing their properties.
All of this adds up to a massive headache for scientists trying to understand the structures and functions of complex sugars. Do the maths and even a mere six-unit sugar of a kind called a glycosaminoglycan has a staggering 12 billion possible versions. Researchers still have no idea how many of all the possibilities are actually exploited by nature, says Ram Sasisekharan, a bioengineer who leads a multidisciplinary team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We're still scratching the surface in figuring out which sugars are biologically relevant," he notes.

Glyconutrients are necessary for optimal health.

Glycemic Index and Heart Disease

From Science News
The New GI Tracks.(glycemic index and heart disease)
Author/s: Janet Raloff Issue: April 8, 2000

For preventing heart disease, diets that control insulin are all the buzz.

Two new tomes offering ways to diminish health complications of insulin resistance share the same title--Syndrome X--the medical name for a constellation of abnormalities that often develop in insulin-resistant individuals (SN: 9/16/89, p. 184). These include increases in blood pressure (SN: 10/14/89, p. 254), the length of time fats circulate in the blood, and the share of cholesterol residing in especially small, low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), which pose a potent heart-attack risk (SN: 9/21/96, p. 182). Syndrome X differs from diabetes in that the body can still produce enough insulin to cope with its elevated blood sugar.

Both books move away from the low-fat mantra that has pervaded major health guidelines for the general population during the past decade and campaign instead for limits on carbohydrates--sugary and starchy fare. The approaches to managing carbs, however, differ dramatically, reflecting a sharp dichotomy in the research community. One of the Syndrome X books, by Jack Challem (2000, John Wiley & Sons), recommends that people with this problem select fare with a low glycemic index (GI). In these foods, carbohydrates break down slowly in the digestive system to provide the blood glucose that powers cells. Challem and his coauthors reason that this sluggish digestion will keep blood-glucose concentrations fairly low, enabling the body to metabolize this sugar via a stable, moderate production of insulin. In the other new book with the same title (2000, Simon & Schuster), Stanford Medical School endocrinologist Gerald Reaven--who first defined syndrome X in 1988--asserts that the easiest way to maintain steady, moderate insulin concentrations is to keep body weight low, avoid bingeing on food, and steer clear of low-fat diets while limiting saturated fats. Indeed, he told SCIENCE NEWS, "the last thing I'd worry about is glycemic index."

Yet the term glycemic index is entering the public lexicon, not to mention medical symposia, health guidelines, and nutritional prescriptions. Fueling this interest is a rapidly growing body of research reporting tantalizing prospects for diets guided by the rate at which their carbohydrates are digested. Some researchers suggest that such diets can also foster weight loss (see sidebar) and perhaps even slow or prevent the development of type II diabetes. Although the authors of these studies are quick to acknowledge limitations in their data--often owing to small test groups or short trials of diets--many are enthusiastic about the potential health payoff from managing insulin via the diet, especially in people with no apparent risk factors for diabetes.

Mannatech products are at the cutting edge of nutritional science.

Dietary Intevention in Diabetes

INTRODUCTION
Dietary intervention has been regarded to be the safest, most economical and best suited life-long intervention for diabetes. Recently, Katani¹ stated that the intracellular, synthesized antioxidant systems comprised of catalase, superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase provide far more protection to cells than pre-formed vitamin and micronutrient dietary antioxidants. The greatest damage from reactive oxygen species and free radicals is to phospholipids and fatty acids in functional cell membranes.
Medial thickening of arterioles has long been recognized as the hallmark of the microvascular disease associated with diabetes mellitus. Deposits of glycoproteins and glycolipids as seen in early stages of atherosclerosis and accelerated large vessel disease are found in diabetics. More recently the role played by peroxidation of plasma lipids as a contributing pathogenic factor in accelerated atherosclerosis of the diabetic state has been recognized.
Reduced serum antioxidant levels have been documented as contributing to the increased oxidative stress in Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (IDDM). Antioxidant deficiencies have been shown to be present at diagnosis of Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT)/Insulin Resistance (IR) and Non-Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (NIDDM).
Antioxidant dietary therapy might retard or prevent progression from IGT/IR to NIDDM and decrease the severity of IDDM and diabetic complications by increasing the antioxidant levels of the body's defences against the increased oxidative stress associated with diabetes.
Hyperglycaemia associated with diabetes has been shown to stress the cellular microenvironment and disrupt cell membrane function. Prolonged hyperglycaemia has been shown to reduce the endogenous intracellular antioxidants such as glutathione peroxidase catalase, and superoxide dismutase . Free radicals, formed by the auto-oxidation of glucose and glycosylated proteins, initiate reduction-oxidation reactions and promote oxidative stress which have been implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetes. The degree of oxidation present in chronic diabetics directly parallels the severity of diabetic complications. Free radicals oxidize proteins causing interference with sodium, potassium, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) ion channels and failure of membrane cell receptors. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) undergoes single and double strand breaks as free radicals attach to phosphate groups, destroying deoxyribose sugars and bases. Excessive oxidation is implicated in mutagenesis, carcinogenesis, diabetes, many other disease processes and possibly aging as it plays a role in tissue degeneration and cell death. The human body has multiple natural antioxidants to manage the ongoing oxidative onslaught. The natural enzyme glutathione peroxidase is regarded as the most important natural enzyme antioxidant in IGT/IR and NIDDM. Persons with IGT/IR are known to have a glutathione deficiency of 15% while NIDDM diabetics have a 20% glutathione deficiency. Glutathione peroxidase activity is enhanced by selenium, but consumes nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) in the energy of regeneration of the natural enzyme. In diabetes NADPH is consumed by the competing reduction of glucose to sorbitol in insulin-independent tissues under high glucose conditions. NADPH is also consumed in converting glucose to other monosaccharides.
Glyconutrients are beneficial to wellness in humans.