In February, Kimberly-Clark began airing ads with a female voiceover telling viewers, "To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: Dads." The ads -- trodding out a tired "dumb dad" stereotype more reflective of Fox's Sunday night lineup than of reality -- suggest that dads can't handle diaper duty. One spot featured fathers neglecting their babies in favor of watching television. This was supposed to convince viewers of how great Huggies diapers were. Not unpredictably, real-world fathers were up in arms

My son does 90% of the diapers in his home. Even this grandfather is a dab hand.

What are the diaper duties in your home?

<blockquote class='posterous_long_quote'><p>About 250,000 Canadians come down with life-threatening infections while in hospitals every year. That’s the highest rate in the developed world. As many as 12,000 people a year die.</p> </blockquote>

Before antibiotics a clean hospital was the ONLY defence against infection. With anti biotic resistance - a clean hospital is once agan the ONLY defence.

This is not a cost issue nor is it about the cleaning staff - keeping everything immaculate was the core of nursing as it still should be.

And if not - then hospitals become death traps as they were before Florence Nightingale

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics debunks all of those myths, and adds disturbingly blunt numbers about our children’s sugar consumption: boys get an average of 16.3 percent of their calories from added sugars, girls 15.5 percent. Younger children do better, with less then 14 percent, and it’s downhill from there: adolescent boys consume 17.5 percent of their diet as added sugar.

That’s a lot of sugar — and all of these children are consuming most of it in the comfort of their own homes, not at school or elsewhere, and not mostly in the form of much maligned soda, either. Sixty percent of the sugar they’re consuming comes from other sources. (Perhaps that bowl of breakfast cereal?) Although that does suggest that eliminating liquid sugar would help — 40 percent less sugar would be a fairly dramatic improvement.

Statistically, family income makes no difference to sugar intake, in spite of the prevalent trope of the upper-middle-class parent who never lets sugar into the house. And we can add sugar to the list of “things white people like,” too: non-Hispanic white boys lead the sugar consumption race to the husky department.

Sugar overload is everyone’s problem. I’m not on the sugar-should-be-a-controlled-substance bandwagon, but I don’t believe it needs to make up 15-plus percent of anyone’s diet, either.

The busting of that second myth points a finger squarely in our direction as parents, and as the wielders of the grocery budget. We can try to tag vending machines and food processors and advertisers, but if most of those sugar calories are consumed at home, that suggests that other than the limited subset of adolescents who do the family grocery shopping, we’re at the very least fully aware of what’s going into the cart, and into our children. That makes us the best people to do something about it.

I spend a lot of time this week on public transit with my gran daughter. All around us are parents stuffing the children with sugar. And the children! Whining, unhappy, wired, noses and eyes streaming. We were at the ROM today. Filled with animals aka human children. All rushing around screaming and paying no attention to anything. Incapable of seeing anything or anything.

This is not an income related problem but a societal problem. How did we all miss this?

This is in our control.

It's our choice. What do you want for your kids?

As I thought further about my friend's comment about a quiet life, I realized that this is also a way in traditional societies that elders served their communities. The elder men stayed in camp while the younger men went out to hunt; the elder women tended fires and young children while the younger women went out to forage. Their stay-at-homeness was not idleness; it was a linchpin for the stability of the community. When the younger adults needed advice, solace, or calm companionship, the elders were always there. When the children needed a grandparent or grand-uncle or grand-aunt to console them from a scolding parent, they knew where to find those elders.

Just what I am doing this week and I want to do more of this. BTW Sophia and I are off to Riverdale Farm tomorrow. We just got back from the ROM today. She liked the tropical fish the best.

Alfie took 4 more steps. The parents will be back tomorrow night and I will go back to an even quieter life on PEI

And in many ways pink slime is the perfect embodiment of a food industry gone off the rails.

In short, they took meat that was too dangerous to feed to humans, disinfected it so thoroughly that a block of the stuff will make your eyes water, and then celebrated the fact that they’d created a two-fer (it’s a food! it’s a disinfectant!).  The industry embraced their creation so completely that around 70 percent of all supermarket ground beef now contains the stuff. But this goes way beyond hamburger. As Tom Philpott points out, pink slime is used in a huge variety of products including “hot dogs, lunch meats, chili, sausages, pepperoni, retail frozen entrees, roast beef, and canned foods.” By industry standards, it is nothing short of a food “intervention” success story.

The irony, of course, is that the 2010 debate over pink slime brought to light evidence that this treated meat product is not nearly as reliable a disinfecting agent as its maker asserted. It was likely those indications that led the fast food industry, in most ways farther ahead of the food safety curve than supermarkets or school food providers, to abandon the ingredient late last year. And now that the mainstream media has taken notice of pink slime, even the USDA has had to back off its wholehearted endorsement for it in school lunch.

But don’t let the appearance of a back-and-forth debate fool you. Pink slime is truly worse than other forms of disinfected treated meat since the trimmings used in pink slime are known to harbor pathogens at high levels before treatment. Should it disappear from store shelves, however, we can rest assured the meat that remains will continue to be treated with other industrial chemicals. Because that’s — pure and simple — the only way the industrial meat industry can prevent its products from making people sick.

Watch this space - soon we offer a CSA for Pasture raised chicken, pork and beef on PEI. What do you want to feed your family?

When I give talks... one of the first things that I do is I hold up a $100 bill, and I say to the audience, whether it's conventional doctors, lay people, or alternative doctors: "If you can name one synthetic petrochemical pharmaceutical that cures any disease... then I'll turn over this $100 bill for you." No one to date has been able to claim the bill. Let's look at what we call orthodox medicine. Most of the drugs are classified into anti's: antihypertensive, anti-acid, anti-pain, analgesic, and immune suppressive which is anti-immune. They're anti's.

... Did God make us with a deficiency of any synthetic chemical anti? I don't think so. To me, the whole foundation of health and treatment of problems revolves around three basic things:

(1) nutrition or malnutrition, in other words getting the building blocks into your body that the body requires to stay healthy and to repair;

(2) elimination of toxins – it's the toxins that are inhibiting their body from repairing, so get them out; and

(3) stress"

But what about genetics? Genetics is actually typically NOT a major part of health and disease, unless you have something like Down Syndrome, for example. But for most other diseases, science now tells us that the environment, and that includes the environment inside your body, has everything to do with genetic expression. And that's the key. The hypothesis that genes are the master controllers has been proven false.

"We're finding out now that malnutrition, toxins, and stress play epigenetic roles on your genes," Dr. Rowen says. "Genes play much lesser role than we previously thought. It's nutrition, toxins, and stress that are playing [influencing] your genes. It's the three that I pay most attention to. There's not one of those three that synthetic petrochemical pharmaceutical satisfactorily addresses."

Most of us believe that our health depends on Dr's and Drugs. But does our health depend on them really?

We take drugs AFTER we are ill. Does your diabetes go away? How about your heart disease? Does your arthritis?

I ask this question because we are reaching a critical moment. The costs of health care - that does not prevent us from getting chronic disease and does not cure any of them - are about to squeeze our ALL other spending.

What stands in the way is our fear that if we don't have all these drugs we will die. So we have to ask our selves - do they make us well? Do they keep us well? if not what will?

The answer is that if we take charge of our lives and eat properly and are active we will keep our health and get our health back.

Of course we need medicine if we are in a car accident. But it does not help us be well or get well. Only we can do that.

This is quite a revolution.

Badvertising: What's in Nesquick?

Do you have kids?

Tell me, can you fathom this scenario ever playing out?

Kid (with whiny voice): "Mo-om, I don't like milk!"
Mom: "Ok honey. How about I make it taste better?"
Kid: "What do you mean?"
Mom: "Watch"

Mom then measures out 3 teaspoons of sugar, dumps them one by one into the milk and stirs.

Kid: "Awesome!"

Sounds crazy, no?

And yet it's happening in kitchens the world over due to the combination of great marketing from the folks at Nesquick (who have currently partnered up with Disney and have licensed their Phineas and Ferb characters to sell chocolate syrup) along with the belief that there's a milk/calcium emergency out there that's so bad that it's wiser to add 3 teaspoons of sugar to every glass of your kids' milk (the amount in a serving of Nesquick syrup) than to have them drink less of it.

It's the they don't like fruit so we'd better feed them pie phenomenon.

Please don't put sugar in your kids' milk.

And Cheerios are a health food too - Come on parents - WAKE UP!

Moving to Open Source Housing!

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has weighed in on the use of so-called "pink slime" in beef served in the government's free and reduced school lunch program.

Today the agency confirmed that it believes the beef product — known in the industry as "Lean Finely Textured Beef" — is safe. Nonetheless, it announced that due to "customer demand" it will give school food administrators that receive meat through the program the option to order beef without it in the next school year.

The de-fatted beef trimmings that are processed into what critics call "pink slime" also end up in much of the ground beef sold in grocery stores. But it's impossible for consumers to know that since USDA doesn't require meat companies to label whether ground beef includes trimmings.

USDA said today that all food purchased for the National School Lunch Program undergoes safety testing, including the Lean Finely Textured Beef. One way the industry says it kills harmful bacteria is by spraying ammonia gas on the meat long before it is served.

USDA's decision comes two months after McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell said they would stop using Lean Finely Textured Beef in their ground beef dishes. In the last few weeks, thousands pf people added their name to petitions asking the government stop buying this product.

At last!

We can all do this. I have a dog and always intend to have one. So I am off to a good start. I have a standing desk - I sit now for maybe 3 - 4 hours a day versus 12 - 14.

What can you do?

We've got a lot of charts that reflect reality rather than hype, so let's get started.Despite all the bleating rationalizations issued by the Education Complex, higher education costs have outstripped the rest of the economy's cost structure. Funny how nobody ever asks if there is any real competitive pressure in the Education Complex; there isn't, and why should there be when students can borrow $30,000 a year?

Student loans are skyrocketing--yes, America, we have a growth industry and it's called debt-serfdom. Debt serfdom is most effective when it starts young, so graduating with $100K in student loans and a couple thousand in high-interest credit card debt is the perfect start:

This is a chart from Zero Hedge drawn from a Federal Reserve spreadsheet: Name The Bubble. Of related interest: 

Student loans enable young people to "stay in school" or "go back to school".Waiting for the economy to pick up may or may not be a good strategy, but piling up debt to do so is a horrendously bad strategy--yet it is the one we enable and encourage.

I have only skimmed this excellent piece - even more information on the end of the job etc as well.

Grim news - but there is a silver lining - now is the time to think more clearly about how you are going to make a living doing something real that has real value. And then how you will learn how to do this.

I will be posting a lot about this shortly.

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled "opinion makers." Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated -- it is quite simply your body's natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator -- inflammation in their arteries.

Let's get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6's are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell -- they must be in the correct balance with omega-3's.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.

One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the "science" that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

I have quoted this post in full because - though long for a post - Dr Lundell says what need to be said clearly and succinctly.

I think we stand at a time as we did in the 1880's. Then the conventional wisdom was that infection was spread by smells. The establishment punished Dr's who suggested otherwise. But the science was coming in and was clear. Infection was spread by contact with germs.

Building safe water systems and sewage meant that it was possible for millions to live safely in cities. Clean operating rooms and tools meant that surgery was possible. Within 50 years, we had pushed infection to the corner.

Now we live in a time of epidemic. Billions are ill with chronic disease. Our medical and state finances are breaking under the strain.

But we still insist that the cause of this is the equivalent of smells. The Low fat high grain diet - far from being the cure - is the source of the problem. We are pouring gasoline on the fire of inflammation that causes all the modern chronic disease. Not just heart but arthritis, strokes, depression and even some cancers.

It's a race. Will we crumble as a society under the strain of the epidemic, or will we accept and then act on what we know is true.

But it all starts with you and me.

I have acted upon this. I have lost all the weight I need to and I have changed my metabolism. I have the body both inside and out of a man half my age. So what about you?

Do you think that chronic illness is inevitable? I did but don't now. Do you expect your family and the state to look after you when you are ill? How can they in the times we live in? Do you at least owe it to your kids and your partner to be well and not a burden? I could not know what I know now and be such a burden.

Give up bread etc for a month and see what happens. You will be stunned by the change - give your health and your family a chance.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Do you have kids close to college age now? What are you going to do?

Will you bet that somehow they will beOK with a BA and $35,000 in debt or do you have other plans?

Please let me know - it's a hard one of all of us.

If the global system continues to deteriorate as nearly every long term indicator says it will, we can expect nothing but bad news in home values for some time to come.  Traditional wealth accumulation in reverse.   Fortunately, there may be a way out of this trap.  A way that makes our homes and communities increasingly valuable the tougher the situation gets economically.

It starts with the realization that over the vast majority of our history as civilized beings, our homes and our communities derived their value from how much food and energy they could produce.  That changed only recently (by historical standards) as we became increasingly dependent on the global economic system.  Due to this dependence, our homes became hollow decorative assets, devoid of any productive capacity.  Our communities became black holes of consumption.

The way out of the trap of sinking valuations is to make our homes and communities productive assets again.  An asset that can produce food, energy, water, and products.  An asset that feeds us, warms us, and provides for us.  An asset that can, in a pinch, generate us income.   A home like that has intrinsic value.  It has value regardless of what happens in the region, the nation, or the world.  In fact, a home or community that is locally productive actually GAINS (mightily) in value as the global financial system tanks, sputters, and goes into cardiac arrest.

A big challenge of our online community is to find ways to do add this productivity to our homes and communities in economically advantageous ways.  Fortunately, it’s getting easier to do this with each passing day.

When is a house not a home? When it is merely a decoration as John says.

100 years ago most homes were the centre of how we supported ourselves. We grew food, we made clothes, we made things to sell to others.

The Greek term for Economy - oikonomia, "management of a household, administration" - is what we have lost.

Time to make our homes the centre of our economy again I think.

Small-scale farming has been in decline for years, of course. Between 1951 and 2006, the number of farms in Canada dropped by nearly 400,000 — more than 63 per cent. Over that same period, the average farm increased in size by 160 per cent.

Canada's current agricultural policy, a $1.3-billion agreement between Ottawa, the provinces and territories signed in 2008, is set to expire in 2013.

Advocates are hoping a new agreement is geared toward new, small-scale farmers rather than large-scale industrial ones.

Often, new farmers don't have access to funding programs because they don't meet the minimum farm income required.

Harbottle, who is also president of the National Farmers Union's youth wing, said many choose to grow vegetables rather than go into livestock or dairy farming, which has higher startup costs.

But Paul Slomp, a 31-year-old cattle farmer living in Ottawa, is committed to making it work.

At Grazing Days, a patch of rented land 20 kilometres south of Parliament Hill, Slomp has been raising grass-fed Angus beef cattle for the past two years.

Slomp was unable to secure a bank loan and instead raised capital privately through friends. He also keeps his expenses to a minimum.

He doesn't own a vehicle and bikes out to the farm every day during the summer. The rent is a fraction of the market value because the owners, former farmers themselves, wanted it to be used for agriculture.

"I don't think I would be able to do what I'm doing if I had to pay market value for my land," Slomp said.

Slomp takes orders directly from consumers, cutting out the middleman that would take away from his slim profit margin. He also rents freezer space in a large storage facility and outsources the slaughtering work to a local abattoir.

Like Slomp, Harbottle initially had trouble securing capital to build the packing shed she needs in order to wash and pack her vegetables for market. She eventually secured a $20,000 loan from a Nova Scotia organization for the equipment.

She now grows more than 40 types of organic vegetables at Waldergrave Farm, which she sells locally and at the farmers market in Halifax, where she has no trouble clearing out her produce.

"There's a lot of demand," she said. "I can't really meet it all."

The new farm finance? CSA and direct local customer investment.

The new family farm is less than 50 acres and in many cases less than 10 acres. This fails to meet the policy criteria of how we see farming. But this is the trend.

An entirely new system is emerging that most of us cannot see because it does not fit our preconception.

Conventional wisdom is that farms have to ge bigger and so be even more corporate. As oil prices rise, this is a stupid ideal that cannot work. The inputs will be prohibitive, as will the transport.

Only a network of small non oil dependent operations will get us through.

This also solves the succession problem as well. Most farmers are 55+ now. It is impossible for an individual, say a child, to take over the debt of the farm and make a go of it. But many small new farmers can in aggregate take over the large farm.

It's a win won for all - and of course the result is better quality food too.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

We know now how to work with nature to have a food system that mimics our hunter gatherer past.

Some of us are putting this into practice.

At some point we will see that the plough - row crops - annuals and mono culture have been a wrong turn

More than 20 million Americans take statins. That would equate to 100,000 new statin-induced diabetics. Not a good thing for the public health and certainly not good for the individual affected with a new serious chronic illness.

If there were a major suppression of heart attacks or strokes or deaths, that might be justified. But in patients who have never had heart disease and are taking statins to lower their risk (so-called primary prevention), the reduction of heart attacks and other major events is only 2 per 100. And we don’t know who the 2 per 100 patients are who benefit or the one per 200 who will get diabetes! Moreover, the margin of benefit to risk is quite narrow.

What should people who are taking statins do? If they are prescribed for someone who has already had heart disease or a stroke, the benefit is overriding — no changes are suggested. But in the vast majority of people who take statins — those who have never had any heart disease — there should be a careful review of whether the statin is necessary, in light of the risk of diabetes and the relatively small benefit that can be derived. Beyond that, a dose reduction or use of a less potent statin should be considered on an individual basis.

Most of the drugs we take - do not work well - anti depressants - and have side effects that are significant. Be careful!

Beige olive oil in plastic bottles is most likely adulterated

Real extra-virgin olive oil should have a vibrant, almost peppery flavor, for instance, and not taste bland or watered down. It is also typically stored in dark, glass bottles so that its array of health-promoting antioxidants, its taste, and its forceful green color -- yes, olive oil should be green, not yellowish in color -- are not harmed by light or damaging UV rays from the sun. For this reason, avoiding olive oil in clear, plastic bottles is recommended.

"What [real olive oil] gets you from a health perspective is a cocktail of 200-plus highly beneficial ingredients that explain why olive oil has been the heart of the Mediterranean diet," added Mueller during his interview with NPR. "Bad olives have free radicals and impurities, and then you've lost that wonderful cocktail ... that you get from fresh fruit, from real extra-virgin olive oil."

Most imported extra-virgin olive oil appears questionable in authenticity

The University of California, Davis published a report on olive oil back in 2010 entitled Tests indicate that imported 'extra virgin' olive oil often fails international and USDA standards. In this report, researchers found that 69 percent of imported and ten percent of California-based oils labeled as olive oil did not pass International Olive Council (IOC) and US Department of Agriculture sensory standards for extra virgin olive oil.

Of those brands tested, the following failed to meet extra-virgin olive oil standards:

• Bertolli
• Carapelli
• Filippo Berio
• Mazzola
• Mezzetta
• Newman's Own
• Pompeian
• Rachel Ray
• Safeway
• Star
• Whole Foods

The following brands were found to meet extra-virgin olive oil standards as part of the study:

• Corto Olive
• California Olive Ranch
• Kirkland Organic
• Lucero (Ascolano)
• McEvoy Ranch Organic

You can read the entire UC Davis Study here:
http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu

Buyer beware!

The P.E.I. Brewing Company, the creators of Gahan beers, is now exporting its products to New Brunswick, and have even bigger plans in the works.

People can get one of the microbrewery's Gahan beers straight from the tap at the Gahan House Pub Brewery in Charlottetown. Also available is the 500 ml bottle of the beer at any of the Island's liquor stores.

As of Wednesday morning, the company started shipping its Gahan-brand beers into New Brunswick for the first time.

“It's a competitive market for sure, but I think we feel that we have a quality product and we can compete in that marketplace as well as anybody,” Jeff Squires, of the P.E.I. Brewing Company, said.

Visitors have been asking when they'll be able to get one of these brews in their home province.

Suds are dying - The 50's - Canadians - The Buds - Red Barrel

The sales of suds are flat all over.

But the sales of real beer are climbing - as are the sales of food in Farmers Markets. As are the sales of real toys make by artisans.

The new market is "Real". And to eb REAL - the object cannot be made in a massive factory. It has to be made by REAL PEOPLE.

So in the new REAL market scale is created by a strong home base and a network.

Gahan offers many on PEI a model. It stared in one pub. The rolled out across the Murphy system. Then into the PEI Liquor commission. At each level, more people discovered what they had been missing.

Then the visitors got involved....

Small is the new BIG

The replica statue of Thomas Jefferson that was installed at the National Museum of African American History, as it was being 3D printed.

(Credit: Red Eye on Demand/Smithsonian)

With just 2 percent of the Smithsonian's archive of 137 million items available to the public at any one time, an effort is under way at the world's largest museum and research institution to adopt 3D tools to expand its reach around the country.

CNET has learned that the Smithsonian has a new initiative to create a series of 3D-printed models, exhibits, and scientific replicas--as well as to generate a new digital archive of 3D models of many of the physical objects in its collection.

Representative of that effort, the museum is touting the 3D printed replica of a Thomas Jefferson statue that it recently installed for the "Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty" exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. According to the museum, this is the "largest 3D printed museum quality historical replica" on Earth and is a copy of a statue on display at Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson museum in Virginia.

I think that 3D printing is going to be massive for Museums - also for "Making" replicas for sale.