Author Archives: Mark Schauss

About Mark Schauss

History was always a passion for me since I was a little kid. Even majored in it in college. Loved my Russian history professor, the late Dr. Paul Avrich who inspired this podcast. Also to my mother Alla who kept the Russian side of me going. Wish I had listened to her to learn Russian when I was younger.

Nutritional Supplements – A few reality checks, part one.

Aside from big Pharma being on their anti-nutritional supplement kick, there is another dark side to the supplement business that needs to have a little exposure.  How often have we heard the comment “it’s natural so it’s safe?”  Well, deadly nightshade and poisonous mushrooms are natural but I wouldn’t eat either so that nonsensical comment about natural being safer should be thrown to the wolves.

There are other issues in the supplement industry that need to be exposed as well.  A number of the problems stem from multi-level companies which tout their products as being the best things in the world and that they will answer all of your health needs if you just sign up and buy their products.  One such company touts that they have over 90 minerals in their multivitamin/multimineral supplement and that this will bring incredible vitality to all who use it. Well, I’m here to give you the old, “buyer beware” warning.  If you think mercury, cadmium, aluminum, and arsenic are essential to health, then by all means buy the gunk.  If you know otherwise like most of us do, then you’ll avoid that overpriced toxic soup like the plague.

When I argued with one of the shills from this multilevel company and pointed out the fact that their product  contained poisonous heavy metals, he proclaimed loudly that “they were organic heavy metals and therefore safe.” When I pressed further and noted that the claim he made was absolute rubbish and total nonsense because organic heavy metals still posed a health threat he responded with the comment that “God put it on earth so it has to be safe.”  He then accused me of being anti-God which took me aback because the last time I heard that kind of reasoning was when I was in elementary school.

The other problem with many of these products is their incredible expense. You’ve got to pay all of those downline distributors so the retail price of the products they hawk have to be exorbitant to start with.  Best to go to your local health food store and buy a high quality multivitamin (capsules not tableted) and save yourself a lot of money and aggravating sales pitches from the salesmen.

 

A few things that aggravate me

My wife keeps claiming I’m still a New Yorker at heart even though I escaped there 23 years ago.  She says that mostly after I’ve been driving.  I like to think its really because I’m someone who wears my emotions on my sleeve for all to see.  Because of that I get peeved about little things once in a while.  Here are a few things people do that really ticks me off.

1. The leave shopping carts in the parking spot when the cart collection spot is only 20 feet away. No wonder Americans are getting fatter!  How lazy do you have to be to not put the cart away?  And please don’t tell me the people who do this have kids and they don’t want to leave them for too long. I’ve watched the people who leave the carts behind and it isn’t mothers of young kids.

2. People who drive and talk on cell phones.  I hate this.  They drive like they’re drunk.  I am all for laws banning this dangerous habit.

3. Red light runners.  Can life be that cheap that you need to run a red light and put yourself and others at risk?  Triple or quadruple the fines for running red lights and you can hire police whose jobs are primarily to catch these scofflaws. If you’re going to tax cigarettes which cause a drain on society, do it for running a red light as well.

4. Medical reporters for news agencies and especially morning news programs.  Talk about misleading and dishonest shills.  Do they even read the studies they report on?  Glucosamine doesn’t work is what the MD shill said on The CBS Morning Show last week.  What a pile of nonsense!!! I read the whole article as I actually subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine (among many others) and it said that it wasn’t as effective in moderate pain relief but was quite effective in serious pain cases.  This tells me it works!!!  Guess everyone has a price.

5. Drug commercials.  I am of the strong opinion that they need to be banned entirely from television and radio.  They are misleading and cause patients to press their physicians to give them drugs they probably don’t need. The drug mentality America has is one that links in with our lack of taking responsibility for ourselves. You can treat your body like crap because some drug company has created a pill that will make it alright.  Guess what? They haven’t. All they did was create a pill that covers up the problems not getting to the root cause.

I’m sure there are more things that irk me but thats it for today.

Evolution – A True Science

This is a controversial topic in today’s media, but in the scientific community, evolution is not controversial at all, it has more proof than Einstein’s E=MC2. hile I will not get into the validity of creationism (I have my personal beliefs which are very personal to me), I cannot stand by and read some of the strange anti-evolution claims made many of which are downright false. 

Instead of writing a long diatribe myself, the magazine Scientific American wrote it for me.  While I object to the title of the article, “15 Answers to Creationism Nonsense“, I can’t argue with the body of the article. 

In my opinion, intelligent design should absolutely be taught to every child in America, by their parents, not our schools.  It is a religious doctrine and if taught in school, it should be in social studies classes and not in science.  I am opposed to schools teaching children about religion.  Not because I am against religion, which I’m not, but because it takes the responsibility away from parents.  Parents are where beliefs should emanate from not schools.  Science should be taught under the guidelines of what science is, not by a religious doctrine shrouded in fancy words to make it self look like science. 

Which form of Magnesium is best???

This is kind of a loaded question as I get arguments from some pretty learned people about this but if you look at the data, its pretty much a safe bet that magnesium bound to amino acids (chelates) is the best way to go.  Thanks to my friend James Larsen, he made me add this to my blog as he sent me a study entitled “Magnesium bioavailability from magnesium citrate and magnesium oxide” by J. S. Lindberg, M. M. Zobitz, J. R. Poindexter and C. Y. Pak at the Center for Mineral Metabolism and Clinical Research, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas 75235.

In this paper, and many others like it, it is pretty clear that using magnesium oxide as a supplement is just not as effective as magnesium citrate.  There is some guy that trolls Yahoo forums trying to get everyone to buy magnesium chloride as some magical form, especially his topical one because he just knows its the best. Problem is, many people are elevated in total chloride loads in their bodies and we just don’t need to add anymore of that to our systems.  To top it off, when asked for proof, he, as many other’s who tout that they have “it”, he resorts to some silly banter about how I’m out to get him and that his proof is on how great he and his family feel.

I’m not here to sell any products, I just want to present the facts.  If you want a good form of magnesium, try magnesium citrate.  It works, and its cost effective. 

Soda Consumption Causes Obesity

Seemingly coming from the University of the Obvious, a series of papers are hitting the journals this week further indicting soda drinking with the growing problem of obesity in children. Of course, if you want to believe in the industry’s side of the story, nothing of the sort is happening. Guess there are people willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder despite hurting people with their stances.
CNN’s website has an excellent article which explains the issue clearly and spotlights those with opposing viewpoints (all industry shills of course). The evidence though is so clear and striking that trying to deny the link between the increase of soda intake and obesity is to deny that your nose is used to breathe.
The estimates of the cost to society of the growing epidemic of obesity are staggering. Increases in type II diabetes even in children is growing quickly, something directly related to the increase in soda intake. Not only should every can of soda have a warning label on it, every school in the United States should ban it on campus. I would venture to guess that test scores would even improve more than adding additional teachers would.
How long will the soda industry keep claiming all is well with their products? Probably as long as big tobacco did with smoking.

Sucralose – The Truth About the Popular Sweetener

There is a lot of nonsense being passed around for fact about sucralose, the sweetener found in Splenda®. The one website that started all of the controversy, mercola.com (no I won’t link to it because that would be defeating the purpose of my rant) makes a series of outrageous claims, he says is based on fact.  I don’t know where he got his definition of fact but my definition doesn’t grow on that tree.

In my humble opinion, his claim is heavily poisoned due to his blatant sales of the natural sweetener stevia.  One on page of false, anti-sucralose nonsense, he doesn’t just tout his brand of stevia once or twice.  Oh, no, he does it 17 times!!! Talk about in your face.

So what’s the truth Mark?  Well here is a paper I wrote a while back for my corporate website, Carbon Based Corporation (go there if you’re interested in learning more about lab testing).

Let’s look at some of the claims against sucralose first:

1. Shrunken thymus glands (up to 40% shrinkage)
2. Only 19 studies on the sweetener exist
3. Correlating sucralose to chlorinated pesticides
4. Absorption and metabolism of sucralose
5. High levels of contaminants
6. No post-approval monitoring

1. The problem with the claim that sucralose shrinks the thymus gland is when you read the study you find that “atrophy of the lymph follicles in the spleen and thymus was observed in the 50,000 ppm group.” The ones fed sucralose at 10,000 and 25,000 ppm did not show this effect. Also, only one toxicologist, Judith Bellin, has disputed the manufacturer’s claims that the effect seen at 50,000 ppm was due to starvation and not from the sucralose.

2. This is blatantly misleading. In the FDA Talk Paper of April 1, 1998 – T98-16, the paper says the following, “In determining the safety of sucralose, FDA reviewed data from more than 110 studies in humans and animals.” To the websites credit, they do indicate that this was the number of studies determined by a MEDLINE search but the problem is that not all studies are reported through this manner so the information he uses is misleading.

3. Comparing sucralose to chlorinated pesticides is a reach at best. This is theoretical and not has not been proven anywhere in the literature. Chemists we’ve spoken to view this claim with disbelief.

4. There is a claim of high absorption of sucralose of up to 40%. First off, since sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sugar, far less needs to be used to gain the same sweetening effect so if absorption is even as high as claimed the amount is miniscule. Second, the preponderance of the literature suggests that sucralose is not absorbed readily in the gut. Most studies admit a 15% passive absorption of sucralose in the G.I. tract but one must remember the minute amounts being used to put this issue in perspective and that much of what has been absorbed is excreted in the urine unchanged. Some argue that intestinal bacteria in the gut (mostly pathogenic) metabolize sucralose but according to Farhadi A, et al, “bacteria metabolized lactulose and acidified the media but did not metabolize sucralose or mannitol.”

5. The argument that high levels of contaminants were found in sucralose is somewhat misleading. The contaminants found in sucralose are similar to many foods we use without question. We live in a contaminated environment which we believe is a major contributor to our many health problems, but you have to be realistic in the review of what is and is not significant. In a perfect world, there would be no need to use a sweetener, but we do not live in one. When trying to mask the bitter and highly objectionable taste of an amino acid complex, compromises are necessary. After careful consideration and an honest review of the literature, sucralose seemed to be the safest and best choice.

The fact that sucralose is produced at an approximate purity of 98% and therefore the rest must be dangerous is conjecture also and a biased interpretation of the literature. The added comment that, “Although manufacturing guidelines do specify limits on these substances there is no guarantee that such limits will always be met.” is a Chicken Little argument. Not every manufacturer is evil and wanting to get away with something. Yes, there may be unscrupulous companies, especially when it comes to other much more popular sweeteners, but you cannot make a linear correlation every time something new comes along.

6. No post approval monitoring. Curious that one of the links provided from the website, the Sucralose Toxicity Information Center, claims that “A possible problem with casecal enlargement and renal mineralization has been seen in post approval animal research.” (my italics) There are currently numerous ongoing studies around the world being published on research relating to the potential harmful effects of sucralose. This is another example of a misleading comment. Baird IM, Shephard NW, Merritt RJ, Hildick-Smith G conducted a human study on different doses of sucralose and found no side effects after approval was granted.

Now before you go off half cocked and tell me that sucralose made me/my kid/my mother/a friend sick, I believe you.  Sugar makes people sick as does a lot of different foods.  Just because someone had a bad reaction, doesn’t mean it is bad for everyone or it offers some proof of toxicity. My daughter has seizures if she has olives, a pretty nasty reaction.  Do I go around using that as a platform to ban evil olives from the market?  Of course not. Same criteria should be used here.  If it is bad for a lot of people and offers no benefits at all like aspartame should we ban it?  Damn right we should. There is no evidence that sucralose is anywhere near as bad as aspartame and the nonsense used against it is pretty much just bad reading of the literature at best, or a down right pack of lies at worst.  You be the judge.

Phthalates in Plastic Bottles – Truth or Myth

As many of you may know, I am a major opponent of the use of phthalates in anything that would come in contact with humans, especially children. What I also am opposed to is perpetrating myths and passing along falsehoods through the Internet.  Here are three myths that need debunking.

Myth #1 – Plastics PET bottles contain phthalates.  FALSE!!!  They do not contain phthalates. 

Myth #2 – Plastic wrap, like Saran Wrap, contain phthalates.  FALSE!!!  Phthalates are not used in the manufacturing of plastic wrap.

Myth #3 – Freezing plastic releases toxins into food. FALSE!!! This is an Internet driven myth that supposedly sites a study done at Johns Hopkins University that showed this to be true.  No such study was done.  It is just another myth.

For real information about environmental toxicity go the the webiste for the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.  The papers are all available free of charge.

Laboratory Testing – Learn from the pros

Are you a health care professional and want to learn what the best laboratory tests are for your patients as well as learning how to interpret them?  Well there is a seminar being put on by Carbon Based Corporation this coming October that you need to go to.  Information about the seminar is available here.

The seminar will cover subjects ranging from what tests to pick, which labs are the best, how to read the results and much, much more.  Practitioners from around the country will be sharing their experiences and will provide valauable tips that will help you help your patient’s more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Guest speakers will also talk about sports medicine, the latest in nutraceuticals for the brain and what services are available to help you and your patients find the best nutritional products out there.

Aspartame and Cancer

A study coming out in March 2006 not funded by the manufacturer shows that there is a strong link between aspartame (Nutrasweet®) and cancer.  Rsearchers at the nonprofit European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences in Bologna, Italy examined 1,800 lab rats consuming this artificial sweetner. They found more lymphomas and leukemias in the rats exposed to aspartame proportionate to the amount they ate.

Dose-response reactions are good indicators of causation of cancer so the link is quite strong.  Opponents of this study cite previous work which did not show a link.  Those studies were either funded by the makers of this poison (wow, surprise surprise they found nothing bad), were poorly done or were too small. Come on FDA, do your job and ban this poison!!!

Calcium, Vitamin D and Osteoporosis

Typically, I would write an article about the silliness that is the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) but this time, I’ll just link to an excellent comment on the subject by Pat Sullivan on his blog.  I couldn’t have explained the problems with the study they published any better than Pat did. Click here to go and read his blog.