A recent study of eight different e-liquids sold by Juul found that some of those products formed chemical irritants called acetals when heated.

Juul is one of the biggest names in the emerging e-cigarette market, but this new study furthers the growing concern that these products may also be incredibly harmful to our health. The lack of knowledge has not been helped by the lack of regulation, as these products don’t require approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That freedom has allowed them to use compounds like vanillin, which is banned in regular cigarettes.

According to Hanno Erythropel, lead author of the study, this is bad news for consumers.

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“People often assume that these e-liquids are a final product once they are mixed…But the reactions create new molecules in the e-liquids, and it doesn’t just happen in e-liquids from small vape shops, but also in those from the biggest manufacturers in the U.S…”

He goes on to say…

“…you are breathing this in. We didn’t imagine people would be inhaling flavor compounds at the level they are now. We have very little information.”

Acetals and Ingredients

Acetals are formed when you eliminate water from alcohol and aldehydes, chemicals used to artificially flavor or perfume food. Exposing human cells to acetals causes human cells to exhibit an irritation response. Researchers noticed high acetal levels in one particular Juul flavor – creme brulee.

The creme brulee tested positive for high levels of vanillin acetals. Vanillin is a compound used for vanillin flavoring. It’s also been banned for use in regular cigarettes. But e-cigarettes contain them. Sven-Eric Jordt at Duke University is a co-author of this study…

We were surprised that levels in Juul vapor were already close to safety limits for workplaces where vanillin is used, such as in bakeries and the flavor chemical industry…”

As the FDA has yet to implement proper regulations or require companies to list the ingredients in their products, it is likely there could be more unpleasant surprises in store for e-cigarette users.

The FDA Calls for Regulation

The FDA is trying to remedy this oversight. The administration had previously set 2022 as the deadline for e-cigarette companies to submit applications to keep selling their products. That has been changed to May of 2020, after a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled that the FDA had been acting outside of its legal authority in allowing e-cigarette companies to operate without proper regulation.

Although previous FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb expressed doubts that e-cigarette manufacturers would find it difficult to get their products approved, it’s not very comforting to think that the only reason the FDA is enforcing rules strictly and in a timely fashion is that they are legally compelled to.

Sources:

• Irritating Compounds Can Show Up In ‘Vape Juice’ – NPR
• Juul vaporizer: What is it, why are teens addicted and is it safe? – CNET
• Juul users inhaling chemicals not listed – YaleNews
• Juul And Rivals, Given 10 Months To Submit FDA Application, Face Battle To Keep Selling E-Cigs – Forbes
• Federal Judge Rules FDA Acted Illegally in Delaying Required Review of E-Cigarettes, Cigars – American Lung Association

While restaurants are lining up to add Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods‘ products to their menus Chipotle Mexican Grill doesn’t want them.

Chipotle provides a menu that contains only 51 ingredients, less than every other major restaurant chain. Chipotle offers “Plant-powered Lifestyle Bowls” and they use sofritas as their meat substitute for their vegetarian customers, which is made from tofu. Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol says that the fake meat products are too processed for their restaurant.

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We have spoken to those folks and unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in our ‘food with integrity’ principles because of the processing, as I understand it, that it takes to make a plant taste like a burger,” Niccol said in an interview. “If there’s a way for them to do this that would match our ‘food with integrity’ principles, I’m sure we would continue talking with them.”

Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol

Beyond Meat’s CEO responded with an invitation, suggesting that Beyond Meat’s factory is much better than what they’d find visiting a factory-farm.

You can come to our facility anytime. Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”

CEO Ethan Brown

Many consumers are looking towards more sustainable foods and becoming more aware of the environmental costs and animal cruelty involved with factory farming. But consumers are also becoming more concerned with health problems with processed foods and GMOs.

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Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods develop their faux meat with highly processed plant-based ingredients. Beyond Meat’s uses pea protein as their main ingredient. Impossible Foods GMO soy and heme which is made from genetically modified yeast.

According to a new report published The BMJ medical journal, more than 1 in 10 patients are harmed in the course of their medical care. Half of those injuries are said to be preventable. Of the preventable errors, 12 percent led to patients being permanently disabled or killed.

The study looked at 70 earlier reports and covered more than 300,000 patients.

Our study finds that most harm relates to medication, and this is one core area that preventative strategies could focus on.”

Maria Panagioti, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester

While 49 percent of the medical injuries were considered “mild,” 36 percent were deemed “moderate,” and 12 percent classified as “severe.”

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This was an international study. Two decades ago a report from the Institute of Medicine showed that medical errors resulted in the death of 98,000 Americans each year. A recent Johns Hopkins study concludes 250,000 people in the U.S. die from medical errors yearly but other reports show numbers as high as 440,000 a year.

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If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S.”

The BMJ

Three unrelated strains of Candida Auris have emerged on three different continents simultaneously, and a new study says rising temperatures due to climate change are to blame. Dr. Arturo Casadevall from Johns Hopkins University is one of the study’s authors, and according to him,

The argument that we are making based on comparison to other close relative fungi is that as the climate has gotten warmer, some of these organisms, including Candida auris, have adapted to the higher temperature, and as they adapt, they break through human’s protective temperatures…What this study suggests is this is the beginning of fungi adapting to higher temperatures, and we are going to have more and more problems as the century goes on…”

Why This Is Scary

C. auris came to the medical world’s attention in 2009, and it has proven to be a particularly troublesome microbe. It often occurs with other infections, leading to the fungus being misidentified and mistreated. C. auris also displays multi-drug resistance and outbreaks usually happen in a healthcare setting like a hospital.

Silent and Deadly

In all the noise about climate change, it’s easy to forget that we aren’t the only organism that will be forever altered by the changes to the Earth’s climate. It would be a mistake to forget that, especially when you realize how much more easily bacteria and fungus will be able to adapt. Candida auris is a new kind of infection, one that’s immune to our usual antifungals, difficult to properly detect, and can be transmitted through person to person contact. This fungus is a new, scary plague, and it won’t be the last.

Sources:

• Deadly Fungal Infection Emerged Because of Global Warming, Study Says – Time
• On the Emergence of Candida auris: Climate Change, Azoles, Swamps, and Birds – American Society for Microbiology
• Rise of Candida auris blamed on global warming – Science Daily

I got curious about carbon sequestration and did some math.

According to my sources, we have about 770,000,000,000 (770 billion) tons of excess carbon dioxide that we need to remove from our atmosphere.

One ton of carbon equals 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide has two oxygen molecules for every carbon).

So we need to remove 210,000,000,000 tons of carbon from the air.

One tree removes 13 pounds of carbon per year. Let’s give it a ten-year lifespan for this purpose. One tree sequesters 130 pounds of carbon in a ten year time period.

A forest contains about 100 trees per acre.

So an acre of trees over a ten year period can sequester 13,000 pounds or 6.5 tons of carbon.

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So we need about 32,300,000,000 (32.3 billion) acres of trees planted to capture the excess carbon within a decade.

And this assumes we don’t add any more C02 to the atmosphere. Plus we are losing 200,000 acres of rainforest every day (73,000,000 acres a year), so that too would have to stop.

What about hemp?

Glad you asked! An acre of hemp can absorb 4.2 tons of carbon per year per acre. That’s 42 tons in a decade. But we can’t just chop down the hemp, let it decompose, and plant more. We need to do something with the hemp, or else much of that carbon goes back into the air. That’s where hempcrete (we need this bad, look it up!) and a variety of textiles and other uses come in! We can make much better concrete out of hemp and concrete is a massive source of C02 output (Cement is the source of about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions).

So if we only planted hemp instead of the trees we need (obviously we should do both) we would need 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) acres of hemp. Let’s add another billion acres for fertilizer production and transportation and other production-C02 costs.

If you want to correct my math drop me a comment:

Sources:

• How much carbon emissions would 1 acre of hemp absorb? – Quora
• Hemp: The Solution for Global Warming – SunStrands
• Facts and information on the Amazon Rainforest – Raintree Nutrition
• We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions – The Conversation
• How many trees would I have to plant to solve Global Warming? – Stack Exchange

The internet has increased our level of awareness to unprecedented heights. For better and for worse, we have had a freedom of information that we have never enjoyed before. One major drawback has been fake news (though the phrase has been co-opted to mean news one disagrees with). Today social media sites are using fake news and other disinformation as an excuse to censor alternative news and information.

Pinterest has banned our website and Facebook has warned us about spreading anti-vaccine information. Even MailChimp has banned anti-vaccine content and Amazon removed books with anti-vaccine information.

A few years ago we saw the writing on the wall and we put our energy towards ensuring we ranked well on the search engines – primarily Google because they account for more than 95% of search engine web traffic.

But on June 3rd, Google had a major algorithm change, which nearly eliminated the organic search results for natural health websites including Green Med Info, Mercola, DrAxe.com, Naturalnews.com, and ours.

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We agree that disinformation is a problem but questioning the prevailing wisdom, raising concerns, and alternative news is imperative for a fair democracy. Censorship is not what we need.

The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.”

Edward Snowden 

This concept is backed up by the fact that the younger generation is better at identifying fake news and other forms of disinformation.

And while Pinterest and MailChimp may mean well, Amazon is getting into big pharma in a big way, Facebook makes a lot of money from the pharmaceutical industry and Mary Ellen Coe, Google’s president of Customer Solutions sits on Merck’s Board of Directors (Merck is one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers). And Alphabet (the company that owns Google) is now a pharmaceutical company.

Google today is not only a weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda but now also a drug company itself. During the past six years, Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched two pharmaceutical companies. In 2013, it founded Calico, run by Genentech’s former CEO Arthur Levinson. Calico operates an R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area for the discovery of treatments associated with age-related diseases. Two years later, Alphabet founded Verily Life Sciences (previously Google Life Sciences). Both pharma companies are partnering with other drug corporations. Recently, Verily has partnered with the European pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to form a new drug company, Galvani Bioelectronics for the development of “bioelectronic medicines.” The collaboration is costing the companies $715 million, and the new firm is being chaired by Glaxo’s former chairman of its global vaccines business.

Fed Up Democrat

Here are ten alternatives to Google search (sourced from Collective Evolution):

• StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).
• Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.
• MetaGer – An open-source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.
• SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
• Qwant – A private search engine based in France.
• DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.
• Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).
• YaCy – A decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer search engine.
• Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.
• Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.

The Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a proposal to ban the use of chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that is already classified as moderately hazardous and that has been linked to neurological issues in young children. This is no the first time the EPA has blocked a ban of this pesticide, with Scott Pruitt denying a petition to ban the pesticide back in 2017. These rejections are contrary to recommendations from the EPA’s own experts.

Chlorpyrifos has been banned in Europe since 2008. States in the U.S. are also working towards banning the pesticide. Hawaii voted to ban the chemical in 2018, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed 5.7 million towards finding safer alternatives to chlorpyrifos, and the New York state legislature has passed a bill banning all use of the pesticide by December of 2021.

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Bad Guy

Chlorpyrifos has been linked to several health issues, the most egregious being neurological conditions in small children. A study conducted by researchers from Columbia University followed measured chlorpyrifos levels in mother’s umbilical cords and gave their children intelligence tests later in childhood. Higher chlorpyrifos levels corresponded with decreased mental development. The chemical has also been linked to attention deficit disorder, lower IQs, and other developmental, altered thyroid levels, and learning disorders in children and lung cancer and immune disorders in adults.

The chemical has also been linked repeatedly to the struggles facing pollinators, specifically bees. Honeybees exposed to chlorpyrifos experience memory and learning deficits, making them less effective pollinators.

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Ignoring Science

Chlorpyrifos is toxic. The Obama administration made efforts to ban the pesticide. Yet Trump and his administration seem determined to treat this like they do other Obama era policies – destroy it. Unfortunately, the president’s destructive behavior is frequently a detriment to the health and safety of the country.

Sources:

• Trump administration won’t ban pesticide tied to childhood brain damage – The Guardian
• New York Passes Bill to Ban Dow’s Brain-Damaging Pesticide Chlorpyrifos – Friends of the Earth
• Hawaii Becomes First State To Ban Widely-Used Pesticide Found To Be Harmful To Kids – HuffPost
• Widely Used Pesticide in Food Production Damages Children’s Brain – Beyond Pesticides
• EWG: ‘Just because chemical agribusiness wants to use a brain-damaging pesticide doesn’t mean they should’ – Environmental Working Group
• Bees ‘dumb down’ after ingesting tiny doses of the pesticide chlorpyrifos – Science Daily