Health News (Week 26 – 2014)
By Robert Redfern
Short-sightedness Caused by Carbs
I am very concerned for the health of everyone but particularly that of children and this concern starts for babies in the womb as you saw in last week’s newsletter.
Expectant mothers are concerned about what they put in their mouths in case it damages their baby in the womb and quite rightly so. Every week I get emails from expectant mothers asking is it OK to take supplements while pregnant. I confirm they are OK and tell them it is essential they take a whole raft of missing nutrients.
Independent nutritionists for nearly 100 years have written books claiming and pleading that high sugar diets are bad for health. Since a two continent study published in New Scientist 2002, it has been confirmed that expectant mothers consuming foods with high levels of sugar have babies with more defects. You can read the full article at the end of this newsletter. This in itself is not scientifically conclusive but if you put the rest of the evidence shown together with this, you get enough facts to convince me that high sugar foods are unfit foods for human consumption.
You would expect in 12 years we would now have a ban on high sugar levels in children foods. In adverts, bars and when I board planes in the USA, I see a warning sign saying consuming alcohol in pregnancy can lead to birth defects.
Why after all of this time do we not have warnings about high sugar foods causing birth defects? The evidence for the damage from high sugar foods and drinks is just as conclusive as alcohol and smoking, scientists plead for it, but governments seem incapable of protecting our children from these dangerous foods and drinks.
Since the increase in eating white rice and adding wheat and other western junk foods to the diet even newer studies reports up to 90% of all school leavers in major Asian cities are now suffering from myopia – short-sightedness. Professor Ian Morgan, who led this study and is from the Australian National University reported 20-30% was once the average among people in South East Asia as well.
My recommendations for you and your babies are:
Eat my really healthy foods plan, which you can find at www.ReallyHealthyFoods.com
The very minimum of supplements for you and your babies are:
Nascent Iodine Drops (recommended by WHO for mothers)
Multi-Vitamin/Minerals complete formulation for missing nutrients
My full super fertility plan for those needing help is: Fertility Health Plan – Click Here
Healthy foods and missing nutrients are needed for both you and your baby’s health and are important not just for now, but for life.
Short-sightedness may be tied to refined diet
11:40 05 April 2002 by Douglas Fox
The food children eat might play as big a role as books and computer screens when it comes to causing short-sightedness.
Diets high in refined starches such as breads and cereals increase insulin levels. This affects the development of the eyeball, making it abnormally long and causing short-sightedness, suggests a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and Jennie Brand Miller, a nutrition scientist at the University of Sydney.
The theory could help explain the dramatic increase in myopia in developed countries over the past 200 years. It now affects 30 per cent of people of European descent, for example.
“The rate of starch digestion is faster with modern processed breads and cereals,” says Brand Miller. In response to this rapid digestion, the pancreas pumps out more insulin. High insulin is known to lead to a fall in levels of insulin-like binding protein-3, the team points out.
That could disturb the delicate choreography that normally coordinates eyeball lengthening and lens growth. And if the eyeball grows too long, the lens can no longer flatten itself enough to focus a sharp image on the retina, they suggest.
“Overnight epidemics”
“It’s a very surprising idea,” says James Mertz, a biochemist at the New England College of Optometry in Boston. But it’s plausible, says Bill Stell of the University of Calgary in Canada. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Those of us who work with local growth factors within the eye would have no problem with that – in fact we would expect it.”
Metz’s institution is now planning studies in animals. But there is already evidence to support the theory. While fewer than one per cent of the Inuit and Pacific islanders had myopia early in the last century, these rates have since skyrocketed to as high as 50 per cent. These “overnight epidemics” have usually been blamed on the increase in reading following the sudden advent of literacy and compulsory schooling in these societies.
But while reading may play a role, it does not explain why the incidence of myopia has remained low in societies that have adopted Western lifestyles but not Western diets, says Cordain.
“In the islands of Vanuatu they have eight hours of compulsory schooling a day,” he says, “yet the rate of myopia in these children is only two per cent.” The difference is that Vanuatuans eat fish, yam and coconut rather than white bread and cereals.
The theory is also consistent with observations that people are more likely to develop myopia if they are overweight or have adult-onset diabetes, both of which involve elevated insulin levels. The progression of myopia has also been shown to be slower in children whose protein consumption is increased.
Journal reference: Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinavica (vol 80, p 125)
