Friday, February 28, 2014

John Yudkin: The man who tried to warn us about sugar -"Pure, White and Deadly"

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Another great article exposing the TRUTH about processed white sugar and detrimental affects to our overall health.  Peace and Love, Mike

3 other great links on the topic of sugar:
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Date: February 12, 2014

By: Julia Llewellyn Smith (Sidney Morning Herald)

A British professor's 1972 book about the dangers of sugar is now seen as prophetic. Then why did it lead to the end of his career?


A couple of years ago, an out-of-print book published in 1972 by a long-dead British professor suddenly became a collector's item.

Copies that had been lying dusty on bookshelves were selling for hundreds of pounds, while copies were also being pirated online.

Alongside such rarities as Madonna's Sex, Stephen King's Rage (written as Richard Bachman) and Promise Me Tomorrow by Nora Roberts; Pure, White and Deadly by John Yudkin, a book widely derided at the time of publication, was listed as one of the most coveted out-of-print works in the world.

Pure, White and Deadly.
Pure, White and Deadly.

How exactly did a long-forgotten book suddenly become so prized? The cause was a ground-breaking lecture called Sugar: the Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at the University of California, in which Lustig hailed Yudkin's work as ''prophetic''.

'Without even knowing it, I was a Yudkin acolyte,'' says Lustig, who tracked down the book after a tip from a colleague via an interlibrary loan. ''Everything this man said in 1972 was the God's honest truth and if you want to read a true prophecy you find this book... I'm telling you every single thing this guy said has come to pass. I'm in awe.''

Posted on YouTube in 2009, Lustig's 90-minute talk has received more than 4.1 million hits and is credited with kick-starting the anti-sugar movement, a campaign that calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18.

Lustig is one of a growing number of scientists who don't just believe sugar makes you fat and rots teeth. They're convinced it's the cause of several chronic and very common illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes. It's also addictive, since it interferes with our appetites and creates an irresistible urge to eat.

This year, Lustig's message has gone mainstream; many of the New Year diet books focused not on fat or carbohydrates, but on cutting out sugar and the everyday foods (soups, fruit juices, bread) that contain high levels of sucrose. The anti-sugar camp is not celebrating yet, however. They know what happened to Yudkin and what a ruthless and unscrupulous adversary the sugar industry proved to be.

The tale begins in the Sixties. That decade, nutritionists in university laboratories all over America and Western Europe were scrabbling to work out the reasons for an alarming rise in heart disease levels. By 1970, there were 520 deaths per 100,000 per year in England and Wales caused by coronary heart disease and 700 per 100,000 in America. After a while, a consensus emerged: the culprit was the high level of fat in our diets.

One scientist in particular grabbed the headlines: a nutritionist from the University of Minnesota called Ancel Keys. Keys, famous for inventing the K-ration - 12,000 calories packed in a little box for use by troops during the Second World War - declared fat to be public enemy number one and recommended that anyone who was worried about heart disease should switch to a low-fat ''Mediterranean'' diet.

Instead of treating the findings as a threat, the food industry spied an opportunity. Market research showed there was a great deal of public enthusiasm for ''healthy'' products and low-fat foods would prove incredibly popular. By the start of the Seventies, supermarket shelves were awash with low-fat yogurts, spreads, and even desserts and biscuits.

But, amid this new craze, one voice stood out in opposition. John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at the University of London's Queen Elizabeth College, had been doing his own experiments and, instead of laying the blame at the door of fat, he claimed there was a much clearer correlation between the rise in heart disease and a rise in the consumption of sugar. Rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and students fed sugar and carbohydrates, he said, invariably showed raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it directly to type 2 diabetes.

When he outlined these results in Pure, White and Deadly, in 1972, he questioned whether there was any causal link at all between fat and heart disease. After all, he said, we had been eating substances like butter for centuries, while sugar, had, up until the 1850s, been something of a rare treat for most people. ''If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,'' he wrote, ''that material would promptly be banned.''

This was not what the food industry wanted to hear. When devising their low-fat products, manufacturers had needed a fat substitute to stop the food tasting like cardboard, and they had plumped for sugar. The new ''healthy'' foods were low-fat but had sugar by the spoonful and Yudkin's findings threatened to disrupt a very profitable business.

As a result, says Lustig, there was a concerted campaign by the food industry and several scientists to discredit Yudkin's work. The most vocal critic was Ancel Keys.

Keys loathed Yudkin and, even before Pure, White and Deadly appeared, he published an article, describing Yudkin's evidence as ''flimsy indeed''.

"Yudkin always maintained his equanimity, but Keys was a real a-------, who stooped to name-calling and character assassination,'' says Lustig, speaking from New York, where he's just recorded yet another television interview.

The British Sugar Bureau put out a press release dismissing Yudkin's claims as ''emotional assertions'' and the World Sugar Research Organisation described his book as ''science fiction''. When Yudkin sued, it printed a mealy-mouthed retraction, concluding: ''Professor Yudkin recognises that we do not agree with [his] views and accepts that we are entitled to express our disagreement.''

Yudkin was ''uninvited'' to international conferences. Others he organised were cancelled at the last minute, after pressure from sponsors, including, on one occasion, Coca-Cola. When he did contribute, papers he gave attacking sugar were omitted from publications. The British Nutrition Foundation, one of whose sponsors was Tate & Lyle, never invited anyone from Yudkin's internationally acclaimed department to sit on its committees. Even Queen Elizabeth College reneged on a promise to allow the professor to use its research facilities when he retired in 1970 (to write Pure, White and Deadly). Only after a letter from Yudkin's solicitor was he offered a small room in a separate building.

''Can you wonder that one sometimes becomes quite despondent about whether it is worthwhile trying to do scientific research in matters of health?'' he wrote. ''The results may be of great importance in helping people to avoid disease, but you then find they are being misled by propaganda designed to support commercial interests in a way you thought only existed in bad B films.''

And this ''propaganda'' didn't just affect Yudkin. By the end of the Seventies, he had been so discredited that few scientists dared publish anything negative about sugar for fear of being similarly attacked. As a result, the low-fat industry, with its products laden with sugar, boomed.

Yudkin's detractors had one trump card: his evidence often relied on observations, rather than on explanations, of rising obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates. ''He could tell you these things were happening but not why, or at least not in a scientifically acceptable way,'' says David Gillespie, author of the bestselling Sweet Poison. ''Three or four of the hormones that would explain his theories had not been discovered.''

''Yudkin knew a lot more data was needed to support his theories, but what's important about his book is its historical significance,'' says Lustig. ''It helps us understand how a concept can be bastardised by dark forces of industry.''

From the Eighties onwards, several discoveries gave new credence to Yudkin's theories. Researchers found fructose, one of the two main carbohydrates in refined sugar, is primarily metabolised by the liver; while glucose (found in starchy food like bread and potatoes) is metabolised by all cells. This means consuming excessive fructose puts extra strain on the liver, which then converts fructose to fat.

This induces a condition known as insulin resistance, or metabolic syndrome, which doctors now generally acknowledge to be the major risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as well as a possible factor for many cancers. Yudkin's son, Michael, a former professor of biochemistry at Oxford, says his father was never bitter about the way he was treated, but, ''he was hurt personally''.

''More than that,'' says Michael, ''he was such an enthusiast of public health, it saddened him to see damage being done to us all, because of vested interests in the food industry.''

One of the problems with the anti-sugar message - then and now - is how depressing it is. The substance is so much part of our culture, that to be told buying children an ice cream may be tantamount to poisoning them, is most unwelcome. But Yudkin, who grew up in dire poverty in east London and went on to win a scholarship to Cambridge, was no killjoy.

''He didn't ban sugar from his house, and certainly didn't deprive his grandchildren of ice cream or cake,'' recalls his granddaughter, Ruth, a psychotherapist. ''He was hugely fun-loving and would never have wanted to be deprived of a pleasure, partly, perhaps, because he grew up in poverty and had worked so hard to escape that level of deprivation.''

''My father certainly wasn't fanatical,'' adds Michael. ''If he was invited to tea and offered cake, he'd accept it. But at home, it's easy to say no to sugar in your tea. He believed if you educated the public to avoid sugar, they'd understand that.''

Thanks to Lustig and the rehabilitation of Yudkin's reputation, Penguin republished Pure, White and Deadly 18 months ago. Obesity rates in the UK are now 10 times what they were when it was first published and the amount of sugar we eat has increased 31.5 per cent since 1990 (thanks to all the ''invisible'' sugar in everything from processed food and orange juice to coleslaw and yogurt). The number of diabetics in the world has nearly trebled. The numbers dying of heart disease has decreased, thanks to improved drugs, but the number living with the disease is growing steadily.

As a result, the World Health Organisation is set to recommend a cut in the amount of sugar in our diets from 22 teaspoons per day to almost half that. But its director-general, Margaret Chan, has warned that, while it might be on the back foot at last, the sugar industry remains a formidable adversary, determined to safeguard its market position.

Recently, UK food campaigners have complained that they're being shunned by ministers who are more than willing to take meetings with representatives from the food industry. ''It is not just Big Tobacco anymore,'' Chan said last year. ''Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation and protect themselves by using the same tactics. They include front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt.''

Dr Julian Cooper, head of research at AB Sugar, insists the increase in the incidence of obesity in Britain is a result of, ''a range of complex factors''.

''Reviews of the body of scientific evidence by expert committees have concluded that consuming sugar as part of a balanced diet does not induce lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and heart disease,'' he says. If you look up Robert Lustig on Wikipedia, nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola.

But Gillespie believes the message is getting through. ''More people are avoiding sugar, and when this happens companies adjust what they're selling,'' he says. It's just a shame, he adds, that a warning that could have been taken on board 40 years ago went unheeded: ''Science took a disastrous detour in ignoring Yudkin. It was to the detriment of the health of millions.''




Monday, February 24, 2014

JFK Speech April 27, 1961 - We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy

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Below are 2 excerpts from speech that President John F. Kennedy gave at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on April 27, 1961 -- "The President and the Press" before the American Newspaper Publishers Association.  This was given 7 mo before he was assassinated.

For some reason it is not showing up any longer on the JFK presidential archives, but a snapshot by The WebArchive in 2008 can be viewed from here:
"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed."
"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."









Sandra Walters - What is Ascension? The Awakening Phenomenon...

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This is a great blog post by Sandra Walters on what Ascension really means in a way that is easy to understand and comprehend even for those that are new to the concepts.  Enjoy...


The Bright Sun, Blue Sky, Clouds

Sandra's Guide to helping your family understand what you are going through
Download the free PDF ebook

Ascension is not about leaving the planet, getting rescued by off-world brethren or flying up into heaven. It is not about watching the Shift unfold online, or waiting for the external world to provide evidence of inner change. Ascension is a conscious choice to engage in evolution.
When consciously activated, the Ascension process affects every aspect, level and layer of a person’s beingness. The physical, emotional, mental, egoic and spiritual structures undergo acute transformation, evolving to meet the demands of a higher level of consciousness.
The Awakening Phenomenon is one of the more impressive effects of the Shift. Amidst the external changes – political, social, financial, spiritual, solar and planetary -  people encounter profound internal change due to the ascending frequencies. This heightened awareness returns wisdom, knowledge and a connection to divine aspects of the Self which had been dormant for thousands of years.

Planetary Ascension is a change in frequency
Dimensions are based on vibration. Each dimension has a range of frequencies which create the reality or experience within that dimension. Anything living on a planet must resonate with the vibrational level of that planet (or higher) or it cannot exist in that reality. As the frequency of the Earth rises, everything on her surface is affected by this increase in frequency. Ascension is the process of frequency change in order to evolve to a higher vibrational state.

Ascension Guidance for activation, integration and acceleration
Integration is vital to achieving a permanent state of higher consciousness. In the Ascension process, it is essential to clear and retrain the lower emotional, egoic and mental constructs which block higher states of consciousness. This frees the true Self to do what it came here to do; awaken and embody a unique expression of Source.
Reliance on external modalities, channels and old paradigm “New Age” methods has limited the awakening process for quite a few people. Many are now ready to take on the task of Self-empowerment, REactivate their Divine HUman state and achieve Crystalline consciousness.

Incredible possibilities for Earth and HUmanity
The Shift, jump time, evolutionary upgrades in consciousness and the ascension process have been discussed for years in spiritual circles, and for millennia in ancient cultures. Waves of unique cosmic energy have been surging through our galaxy for decades, and the window of amplification has arrived.
It isn’t the “end of the world.” It’s a beginning of a new paradigm, and big change is typically rough. The “Shift” is a shift in consciousness; a dramatic change in the parameters by which we experience reality. The physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and dimensional changes which are occurring here have never been experienced before. It is a fantastic time to be here and experience evolution first-hand.

How do I ascend? Won’t it happen to me anyway?
Each dimension has a range of frequencies which create the structure for experiencing a certain kind of reality. Third dimensional reality is the lowest density (frequency) which a human expression of consciousness may experience. There are many side effects of the old 3D reality, including the illusion of linear time, the inability to perceive higher dimensions, and spiritual amnesia where the memory of past lives, experiences in other dimensions, and connection to the rest of the Universe is forgotten. But all of that is changing during the Shift. This is why the phenomenon of “awakening” is so widespread; we are waking up from the amnesia of 3D and reconnecting with higher dimensional consciousness.

Apocalypse and the planet
Anything which desires to experience life on a planet must resonate with the vibrational level of that planet (or higher) in order to exist within the parameters of that reality. The frequency of the Earth has been increasing, and continues to rise, which means everything in, on and around her surface is affected. Higher frequency always raises the lower vibrations. As the parameters for 3D reality dissolve, and then 4D, the planet supports the experience of a higher dimension. This change in dimensional structure is becoming very apparent to the awakened. “Apocalypse” means “lifting of the veil” – the unveiling of higher dimensions which were once hidden by the density of 3D reality.

The HUman Ascension process
HUmans are unique; our DNA hold the codes for all life in this Universe, an expression of Creator consciousness embodied (creator-in-carnate) in HUman (God-man) expression. Your primary responsibility in this game of amnesia is to wake up and remember who you are as a divine HUuman.  The Ascension process is the transformation of the physical body, light body and the consciousness which animates it, in order to hold a higher vibrational state. Your higher self is merging with your lower dimensional self after a very long separation in the 3D experience.
In order for your body to be capable of  holding that higher frequency, it must transform into a crystalline-based cellular structure. DNA which has been dormant must be activated. Our consciousness must be expanded beyond the boundaries of habitual 3D/4D existence. It is physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually challenging, and it is quite amazing. Medical impossibilities are popping up all over the globe. Not everyone has chosen to awaken in this lifetime, nor do they have to awaken. There are many factors involved in experiencing the Ascension process, and we are all here to play out the Shift in our own way.

The changes will affect your lifestream
Severe weather and climate change are imminent due to the drastic reduction of the magnetosphere and magnetic shifts in the Earth itself. Global warming is simply an affect of the collapse of the astral planes of consciousness as we go through the Shift.
Mother Earth is a very patient conscious entity with a long and diverse history. This window of evolution coincides with many galactic alignments, some of which only occur in million and billion year cycles. Galactic cycles are very long, and the experiences of other off-world races, systems and galaxies depend upon the raising of Earth’s frequency. It’s a bit like being the weakest link – other games cannot be played until this density is upgraded.
Earth is constantly balancing magnetics as 3D dissolves from the collective reality. The doom timeline – a complete destruction of everything on her surface – has been eliminated thanks to the amount of awakened consciousness on the planet. She is heavily influenced by the collective consciousness, and millions have been connecting with her to smooth the transition during the Shift.

It is a process which requires participation.
Our planet ascended to 5D in December of 2012. This means a platform for the new experience of the return to the true HUman genome is provided. Kindwhile, HUmanity is able to transition from the 4D platform we currently experience to the 5D platform which  will eventually merge with the lower 4D expression of Earth.
Evolution is evolution; the entire planet and all of her residents are experiencing the Shift, regardless of their awareness of it. Ascension is a conscious process which requires a choice to engage with the unknown, in order to experience something brand new. It is a remarkable, challenging and rewarding process which frees the Self from perceived limitations.