From todays Independent:

US issues health warning over mercury fillings

They’re in millions of mouths worldwide, but have been linked to heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Now a report concedes they may have a toxic effect on the body

Amalgam dental fillings – which contain the highly toxic metal mercury – pose a health risk, the world’s top medical regulatory agency has conceded.

After years of insisting the fillings are safe, the US government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a health warning about them. It represents a landmark victory for campaigners, who say the fillings are responsible for a range of ailments, including heart conditions and Alzheimer’s disease.

Earlier this month, in an unprecedented U-turn, the FDA dropped much of its reassuring language on the fillings from its website, substituting: “Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and foetuses.” It adds that when amalgam fillings are “placed in teeth or removed they release mercury vapour”, and that the same thing happens when chewing.

The FDA is now reviewing its rules and may end up restricting or banning the use of the metal.

Mercury is placed in tens of millions of teeth worldwide each year. About 125 tons of it is used annually in dental treatments in the EU alone. And it was used in eight million fillings (including one million in children and young people) in Britain in 2002-03, the last year for which the British Dental Association (BDA) can produce figures.

The association continues to insist that amalgam is “safe, durable and cost-effective” and “does not pose a risk of systemic disease”, though it advises pregnant women to avoid “any dental intervention or medication”. However, Norway and Denmark banned mercury from fillings earlier this year. Sweden has cut its use by more than 90 per cent over the past decade, and mercury use is also heavily restricted in Finland and Japan.

Mercury makes up about half of an amalgam filling, where it is mixed with silver and small amounts of copper and tin. The combination – which has now been used for some 150 years – is extremely durable, and its supporters used to stress that it locked in the mercury. They now accept, however, that mercury vapour escapes, is breathed in, and gets into the bloodstream and organs, but they also stress that levels are very low. Opponents argue that the metal accumulates in the body and no safe level is known.

Some research suggests that mercury from dental fillings may be linked to high blood pressure, infertility, fatigue, disorders of the central nervous system, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. Dentists have been found to have high levels of mercury in their bodies as well being more susceptible to brain tumours and problems with concentration and manual dexterity.

However, a study that followed 507 Portuguese and American children for seven years after they received amalgam or mercury-free fillings found no differences in the rates of neurological symptoms between the two groups.

Nevertheless, more and more dentists – now some 500 in Britain – are setting up mercury-free practices, and more patients are demanding alternative fillings made of resin and glass.

The alternatives are more expensive and not as strong as amalgam, which leads the defenders of mercury to say that only mercury will do for molars, which carry most of the burden of chewing. And some have released another toxic material, the gender-bending chemical bisphenol A. But the alternatives are getting stronger, and the chemical is being used less in the newer products.

Even the BDA now says that the alternatives “have improved over time”, adding: “Trends towards greater use of these materials imply that there is to be a sustained reduction in the use of dental amalgam.”

I’ve fixed things up in the Nutrition and Bodywork sections of the site.

Will my baby ever sleep through the night? I am almost at the point of buying the Sleep Sense program just to see if it works, but the perverse independent streak that runs/ruins my life has me going it alone still. I decided that enough is enough of this nursing to sleep. Yes I believe in extended breastfeeding, but a nearly 16-month-young baby does NOT need to suck herself to sleep. So for the past two nights, I bath, then feed, then put her in her bed, then read a story, then sing her song, then do pick-up-put-down until she sleeps. Last night was terrible - screams and tears and nearly two hours of struggle until her father finally took up the reins got her to sleep, exhausted. I hate that sort of thing. My poor little baby has no need for such emotion and stress.
But tonight, lo and behold, the whole thing went much more smoothly and after only an hour (!) of gentle coaxing, she drifted off softly and sweetly to snooze. Please, please, let her sleep all night…

You can make a tasty breakfast cereal by puffing your own grains. Here’s how:

1. Place cereal grains to be puffed in a standard vegetable steamer, above a pan of rapidly boiling water. Close lid and steam for 7 minutes.
2. Meanwhile. heat a heavy-bottomed pot on the stove. I use a “Le Creuset” style cast-iron and ceramic pot. Helps build the biceps at the same time!
3. Put a little drop of oil in the pan and add 3-4 grains of your chosen cereal. When they pop, your pan is ready to go.
4. Add the rest of the grain and allow to heat without moving. When the first grains begin to pop, start shaking the pan to ensure that no grains are in contact with the heat for too long. You may smell toasting, but any smell of buring is a BAD sign. If it gets to buring point, remove from the flame immediately and keep shaking the pan vigorously with the lid on, tossing the grains inside.
5. Cool then transfer to an airtight container. Use for making breakfast cereal, or little sweets with honey, or savouries like sev puri.

Another good article in today’s Independent:

Imagine if today, scientists discovered a drug that could save 13 per cent of all the babies who currently die. Now imagine that drug also made your baby cleverer – and dramatically slashed her chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, leukaemia, asthma or obesity as an adult. Oh: and imagine it was free.

The “drug” exists. It is called breast milk. Yet in the developed world, we often stigmatise women who give it to their babies as “creepy”. In the developing world, we allow corporations to tug babies from their mother’s nipple, and put them on to powders that bring more profit – and more death.

I come at this from a strange perspective. My mother breastfed me until I was nearly three; she only stopped the day I wrote her a note saying I expected to be breastfed that afternoon. Today, whenever I have a success, she clutches her breasts and exclaims: “It’s thanks to these!” Whenever my bottle-fed brother and sister have a failing in life, she howls: “Think what you could have been if I’d given you the tit.” (Whenever she gets a bit too self-congratulatory, I remind her she also smoked 40 cigarettes a day. “Ach,” she says, “it’s stressful having a little bastard suckin’ at you all the time.”)

It’s the best thing you can do for your baby – without it I’d be even fatter and more disease-ridden. It’s good for you too, significantly reducing a mother’s risk of osteoporosis and cancer of the ovary. Yet my mum was made to feel like a flasher. She was glared at in public places, and asked to leave restaurants, parks and even buses. Unsurprisingly, Britain today has the worst record on breastfeeding in the developed world, after Belgium. Some 24 per cent of our babies never taste breast milk at all – and by six weeks, a majority have shifted entirely to formula.

Why? Why do we hobble our babies, and our country? Let’s rule out some of the more glib explanations. The number of women who physically can’t breastfeed with the right support is negligibly small: the World Health Organisation (WHO) puts it at 1 per cent. Nor is it because women prefer the “liberation” of the bottle. A Department of Health study found that 90 per cent of mothers who stopped feeding at six weeks said they wanted to carry on, while 40 per cent of those who stopped at six months felt the same.

The most primal reason belongs to an old, old story: women are conditioned to find their own bodies disgusting, except when they can be used to entice men. A get-your-tits-out-for-the-lads culture doesn’t want you to get your tits out for your baby: they’re for titillation, not nurture. This week, one of the Government’s best ministers – Harriet Harman – has succeeded in peeling this back, by including the legal right to breastfeed your baby in public into the new Equalities Bill.

But the biggest reason most women give for reluctantly pushing their baby on to the bottle is their need to return to work. How do we change that? For clues, look at the country where breastfeeding rates are still 90 per cent at six months: Norway. They give mothers a year off with 80 per cent pay, and give state employees breastfeeding breaks when they do come back. Yes, this costs businesses some money up front – but it saves a fortune further down the line, because you have a cleverer workforce that pays more tax and puts less pressure on the health service. If British babies were breastfed at Norwegian rates for just three months, the NHS would save £50m annually in the treatment of one disease alone – gastroenteritis.

That leaves another dark explanation for the fall-off: the role of unchecked corporate power. There is no profit to be made from a mother’s milk, so at the turn of the last century corporations tried to find a way to divert babies from nestling at their mother’s breast to Nestlé-ing at the corporate teat. They invented “baby formula” and marketed it as the classier, cleaner alternative. Cow & Gate powder was sold with a crown on the tin, bragging the Windsor children used it. (Look how that turned out.)

Gradually, in the democratic world, the corporations were restrained from making the most blatantly bogus claims about breast milk – but they keep slipping the leash. In Britain, they are banned from marketing baby formula to those younger than six months old. But instead they market “follow-up formulas” for older kids with exactly the same logo, covered with claims that it is “closer than ever to breast milk”.

This has produced a situation of startling public ignorance, where a third of mums think baby formula is “as good” or even “better” than breast milk. The poorest women know least and shift to formula first – adding another milky layer of inequality to our island. This dodgy marketing needs to be banned today.

But this breast-con swells to a 52DD scandal in the developing world. I recently visited Bangladesh, where mothers are routinely told to abandon their healthy breast milk and spend great swaths of their income on formula. I think of all the dead and dying babies I saw, and wonder how many could have been saved by a substance that was there, free, all along. WHO calculates that 1.3 million babies die every year because they are not breastfed. That’s a World Trade Centre-full a day.

Nestlé are still the most notorious offenders, controlling a near-majority of the world market. In Botswana, Nestlé has distributed a pamphlet claiming if you give your baby its “acidified” formula, “diarrhoea and its side effects are counteracted”. In reality, babies who use this rather than breast milk are more likely to contract diarrhoea – and die. Public health campaigns can hardly fight back: the corporation’s annual marketing budget is bigger than the entire annual budget of the world’s 28 poorest countries.

Nestlé says they consistently promote breastfeeding as the first, best option – but in 1999, a British Advertising Standards Authority studied the evidence and ruled they had to remove from their advertising the claim they sold their formula “ethically and responsibly”. It is only tight, binding international regulation – here, and abroad – that will tame corporations from milking the poorest with misinformation. To join the campaign to make it happen, visit www.babymilkaction.org.

And yet, for all the evidence, it still seems like an implausible story. Can a powder mix of misogyny and unregulated corporate power really induce women against their will to harm their own children? It does, baby, every day. These are still shockingly powerful forces. Now suck on that – or fight back.

From today’s Independent:

They are the cosy, friendly foods that present us with a rosy image of our childhoods: Quality Street chocolates and Angel Delight dessert; Horlicks instant night-time drink and Knorr stock cubes.

As brands, they endure. Not quite as cutting edge as their more sophisticated and modern supermarket-shelf counterparts, perhaps. And certainly not as healthy. Because the truth is that some of the leading comfort foods we remember from our youth are doing their very best to kill us.

The culprit is one item, usually tucked away in tiny lettering on the ingredients label. It’s called hydrogenated vegetable oil. It sounds harmless enough, but it is one of the most dangerous products ever to be mashed into the food we eat.

Food scares are, of course, nothing new, but hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO) elevates health risk to a whole new level. Recent scientific research suggests that it may be responsible for an unknown, but certainly very large, number of heart attacks.

Clinical researchers have discovered that ingesting just two grams a day of HVO – the amount contained in just one doughnut fried in this type of fat – increases an individual’s risk of heart disease by 23 per cent. This makes HVO much more dangerous to health than the saturated fats such as butter it often replaces. It distorts cholesterol levels, encourages obesity, causes inflammatory conditions, and can even be a cause of infertility.

Yet, despite the dangers, many major UK food producers continue to use it in everyday products. Brands that include it in their manufacture include Cadbury Heroes, some Nestlé and Mars confectionery, Batchelors Cup a Soups and even Haliborange Omega-3 Fish Oil capsules for children.

Nor is its use confined to retail food goods. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, or trans-fat, as it is sometimes called, is also widely used in bakery products, and by restaurants and takeaways, where it usually does not have to be labelled and declared as being present.

Given the risks, why do some of the country’s leading food companies continue to lace their brands with this deadly ingredient? The answer is predictably simple: cost and convenience. Trans-fats were discovered back in 1903, when oil was boiled to more than 260C in the presence of a metal catalyst such as nickel. The result was that its molecular structure mutated, turning the oil into a hard, greasy, grey lard-like substance looking, as one observer described it, like “the skin of a corpse”. The original purpose in making it was to create a cheap form of candle wax as an alternative to the more expensive tallow. That this wax could also be used in mass food production was a commercially sensational secondary discovery.

“Hydrogenated vegetable oil may look and sound disgusting, but in many ways, it’s a food scientist’s holy grail,” explains the health writer and author Maggie Stanfield, whose recently published book, Trans-Fat: The Time Bomb in Your Food tells the full story of its acceptance by the food industry.

“It can be used as an alternative to butter – it’s a lot cheaper, is taste-free, gives what the industry calls ‘good consumer mouth feel’, and lasts a long time. A very long time. An American TV programme recently featured a fairy cake made more than 25 years ago. It still looks perfect.”

These days, far less harmful substitutes are readily available, and some UK food producers now take advantage of them. Others, though, persist in their use. And why shouldn’t they? Trans-fats keep production costs down, and most consumers remain unaware of their dangers, believing, wrongly, that the real peril to their health lies in saturated fats such as palm oil and butter, which are actually far less harmful.

Given the weight of scientific evidence that has now built up against trans-fats, there is an overwhelming case for the Government to ban their use. This has already happened in Denmark, where legislation removing HVO from the food chain was introduced five years ago. Since then, the rate of heart disease among Danes has dropped by a staggering 40 per cent. The only European country to follow suit since then is Switzerland, which introduced a ban this April. Britain has no plans to take action, instead being content to leave the industry to get its own house in order.

Will it do so? There is little evidence of any enthusiasm for change. Legally in the UK, HVOs must be identified on ingredients labels, but to most shoppers it is just another meaningless name. There is nothing to indicate that it is hazardous to health. A voluntary deal was forged last year by major food retailers, but it only commits them to removing HVOs from own-label products. There is evidence that the deal is already being broken.

Professor Steen Stender, the Danish cardiologist who led the drive to ban trans-fats, says that voluntary codes never work. “Why should people need to know terms such as ‘hydrogenated vegetable oil’? The EU must ban their use.”

Having researched the topic thoroughly, Maggie Stanfield is convinced that the only safe amount of HVO we should be eating is no HVO at all. “When we eat trans-fats, our cells get confused. They identify the fat as unsaturated – it comes from vegetable oil, after all – but because of the industrial process involved, they can’t handle the fat as they would a truly unsaturated one.

“Instead, HVO actually changes the cell structure, making the wall soft, and acts like a pincer, raising bad cholesterol on the one hand, lowering good on the other. So the gap is widened, making us more vulnerable to heart disease.”

Stanfield believes that it suits the food industry to keep trans-fats a trade secret, doing little or nothing to flag them up. “They’re hugely useful to the industry as they have a shelf-life of years, don’t add unwanted flavour, don’t need to be chilled, and are very cheap, unlike the natural alternative. A chip shop can deep fry in HVO for a month, for example, where vegetable oil must be changed every few days.”

Given that there is conclusive evidence of the damage HVO does, Stanfield adds, an EU-wide ban is imperative. “What are we waiting for? Denmark has led the way, and the rest of Europe needs to get rid of these killer fats now.”