AN ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY

Dr. Ben F. Feingold was chief of allergy at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco in the 1960’s.  He observed that some of his allergy patients who removed certain foods and additives from their diets reported that they (or their children) were calmer and better behaved.  His research led him to discover a sensitivity in some people to certain foods and food additives.  This sensitivity led not only to physical problems, but behavioral problems and learning difficulty as well.

Dr. Feingold, a pediatrician, developed a special diet, first called the Kaiser Permanente diet, and later the Feingold diet, as a treatment for children with ADD and ADHD.  His discovery has led the diet to be successfully employed for any person who has these sensitivities. The treatment is simple; the results are in some cases, miraculous.

Studies show a success rate of between 58% and 81%, and one study from the University of Wisconsin showed a 100% success rate.

DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOUR CHILD?
How do you know if your child is Feingold sensitive? The Feingold Association of the United States offers a checklist of behavioral concerns that may indicate a sensitivity including:

• Marked hyperactivity
• Impulsive action
• Poor self-control
• Unpredictable behavior
• Abusive behavior to people or pets
• Little or no recognition of danger to self
• Perseveration
• Low frustration tolerance
• Excessive whining
• Short attention span
• Impatience
• Accident proneness
• Difficulty writing and drawing
• Resistance going to bed
• Difficulty falling asleep
• Restless sleep
• Headaches
• Stomachaches
• Tics

If any of these presentations sound like your child, you may want to consider trying the Feingold diet.

ONE PARENT’S  STORY

When we talk about how our son John used to behave, people who know him literally think we are joking.  John is an unusually gentle, kind, sensitive child who is very focused on fairness and respect.  He has never had a time out in school.  He is shy, considerate, patient, meticulous, and sometimes meek to a fault.

So it’s hard to believe he used to be a bully.

But it’s true.  When he was one and two years old, he gradually began to develop more erratic and unpredictable behavior.  He whined a lot, was difficult to satisfy, had edgy, frenetic physical energy, and could not get to sleep.  The worst, though, was that he tended to lose his temper suddenly with other children, and when he did, he would hit them.  Hard.   One time at a playdate he walked over to his friend Owen, and completely out of the blue pushed him so hard that he lifted the smaller boy off his feet and five feet in the air onto his back.  After we separated the two kids, I asked John why he did that.  He shrugged his shoulders, looked me in the eye and answered with complete honesty, “I don’t know.”

He was not a pleasant person to be around.  He hit his mother.  He whined incessantly.  He cried a lot.  He had tantrums.

The hardest part was this deep feeling I had in my gut that this was NOT my child.  That there was a REAL John in there somewhere that was trapped.  I found myself slowly surrendering my fatherly dreams of a magical child who grew up strong and kind and wise, who aspired to great thing and inspired those around him.  I lowered my expectations to the realm of survival.

Some parents said it was simply the “terrible two’s”; but the behavior had started long before the “two’s”, and it just didn’t feel right.  We heard about the Feingold diet and saw a checklist like the one above and said, “That sounds like our kid!”  So we tried it.

Now, there are very few instant, magical, complete cures that one is likely to experience within a lifetime.  This was one.  In three days, our son, our John, the REAL John, was back.  It was LITERALLY Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jeckyll.   He was sweet, patient, content, grateful, kind.  And every time we missed something and a dye or preservative or some vinegar “got through”, Mr. Hyde came back, and stayed for exactly three days.  The Feingold program has proven itself to us in the many times we would observe the behavior without realizing something had gotten through, only to discover the culprit later. 

I will never forget making fish sticks one night.  John took a bite, stood up, walked over to his mother and punched her in the arm.   “Why did you do THAT?” I gasped.  He gave his shrug and said, as if we were both watching someone else do it on TV,  “I don’t know.”  I checked the ingredients and discovered vinegar listed in tiny print.

We taught John to recognize the symptoms of a “reaction” and to associate the Feingold list with how terrible he felt during those times.  It was easy in this way to teach him to self-regulate his diet.  We have never had an instance of John eating something without checking its safety: he has such a visceral connection to the reactions, he has no interest in going there for any reason.

The Feingold diet saved our son, and when I look around I see, every day, children that look JUST like our son used to look when he was reacting (which, before we discovered Feingold, was every day: he loved apple juice, raisins, ketchup, grape juice, berries, pasta with red sauce, etc).  I hope the parents of these children at least try the diet for a few days just in case their Mr. Hyde might be waiting to turn magically into wonderful Dr. Jeckyll.

SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS

One big benefit is that the diet is easy to try, you only have to try it out for a few days up to a couple weeks in order to determine if your child is sensitive, and the big jackpot is, if your child is Feingold sensitive, you may have found that elusive Magic Bullet that will turn your Dr. Jeckyll into Mr. Hyde (Though the Feingold Association suggests 4-6 weeks).

The Feingold Diet eliminates two classes of foods: artificial dyes and additives, and foods naturally high in salicylic acid.  The following is the main  list of what to avoid:

• Synthetic food dyes, colors
• Artificial flavors
• Three main preservatives- BHA, BHT, TBHQ
• Foods high in salycilates, including
  • Almonds
  • Apples (including juice, cider, sauce, etc)
  • Apricots
  • Berries (all)
  • Cherries
  • Cloves
  • Cucumber, pickles
  • currants
  • Coffee
  • Grapes, raisins, vinegar (except grain vinegar, rice vinegar)
  • Apricots
  • Nectarines
  • Oranges
  • Peaches
  • Peppers
  • Plums, prunes
  • Tangerines
  • tea
  • Tomatoes
  • Oil of wintergreen
  • Rosehips
  • Aspirin

This may seem like a prohibitive list, but keep in mind that there are many alternatives to these foods.  Apples, for example, are off limits but pears are perfectly fine.  Oranges are a no-no but grapefruit is ok.

Tropical fruit is almost all friendly: bananas, guava, mango.  Also Dates, figs, avocado, cantaloupe, coconut, pineapple, papaya and most vegetables.

Sadly, many parents will consent to risky medical interventions and medications before making the simple effort to test their child for sensitivities like Feingold.  Others will do nothing at all, chalking their child’s behavior on his or her personality, or simply believing they will “grow out of it”.  We have seen many children in our professional and personal lives who present with classic Feingold behavior whose parents have been told about Feingold yet have never made the effort to test.  When the risk is virtually zero and the return is potentially massive, it’s hard to imagine what is going on inside their minds.  Perhaps they have been eating too many almonds.  If your child may be Feingold sensitive, please consider taking the few days or weeks to try the diet.  You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Another thing that is important to understand is that many parents dismiss the idea of food sensitivities because they feed their kids organic, free range, fair trade, local healthy foods.  However, the truth is that Feingold is not as much about how healthy the food is, it is about isolating specific chemicals in foods that may irritate the system of one sensitive to them.  Organic apples will make the kid just as crazy as conventional.

If you determine your child is Feingold sensitive, you can proceed to “Stage Two” in which certain foods are reintroduced.  Synthetic additives are not reintroduced.

For more information, speak with Dr. Matt or Dr. Julieta.  You can also contact the Feingold Association of the U.S. at 631-369-9340 and at www.feingold.org. (read more…)

 

Imagine a road winding through high, steep cliffs.  In one section, there is a steep downgrade followed suddenly by a severely sharp curve bordered by a 100 foot sheer drop to jagged rocks below.  Chronically poor road conditions and the lack of any railing on the road contribute to a high rate of accidents on this section of road.  Now imagine that all of the vast resources of the residents of the area are poured into improved ambulance services for the crash victims, enhanced trauma care at the local hospitals, and the latest in emergency room diagnostic devices.  The resources at the bottom of the cliff are vast, and the individuals and corporations that supply them are lauded.  Much emotion is put into the effort to fund these measures.  Little energy is devoted to preventing the crashes in the first place.  The assumption is that the crashes must be inevitable and the “solution” is defined by reducing the number of fatalities.  A small faction of residents  advocate for the installation of better guardrails, road signs warning of the upcoming hazard, and improved automobile safety design.   Obviously these  are not mutually exclusive endeavors, but if one is to be pursued at the expense of the other, who in their right mind would choose the ambulance and trauma care over the safety and preventive measures?

In this story, the car crashes represent cancer cases in the U.S.   As an advocate and activist for the reform  of cancer prevention education and funding, I have been warning the public to be cautious about the potentially misleading information which the media and even large cancer advocacy groups tend to produce around cancer prevention.  There is a strong tendency to focus both education and funding on treatment first and “screening” second, with actual prevention often taking a back seat, if offered a ride in the car at all.

If you question my skepticism, ask any woman over 40 what she has learned about preventing breast cancer.  Chances are, she will respond with the magical word, “mammogram”.  Yet the truth is that mammograms do nothing whatsoever to prevent breast cancer, and in fact bombard the breast with one of the few things we know cause cancer, ionizing radiation[1].  Furthermore,  mammograms are not the tool they have been promoted to be.  Recent research from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has  revealed evidence that mammograms for women under 50 are probably not helpful and after 50 are overutilized[2].  Their official recommendations are for NO routine mammograms  before age 50 and even after 50 mammograms should be only once every two years.  By age 75 the risks outweigh the benefits again.  They even debunked the value of the breast self-exam, or BSE[3].

The take-away from all this is that neither mammograms nor BSE’s affect breast cancer incidence whatsoever.  They detect cancer that has already occurred.  In a sense, they are the opposite of prevention: they show how badly we have failed to prevent cancer.  As I have written before, calling mammograms or any other screening device a preventive measure is like calling a pregnancy test a form of birth control.

Meanwhile, the relationship of lifestyle and environmental factors to cancer incidence has been underreported, underfunded, and underexamined.  Recently, the President’s Cancer Panel published its findings on environmental cancer risks, in association with the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services[4].  In this report, the Panel stated,

“The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated…

“…Research on environmental causes of cancer has been limited by low priority and inadequate funding.  As a result the cadre of environmental oncologists is relatively small, and both the consequences of cumulative lifetime exposure to known carcinogens and the interaction of specific environmental contaminants remain largely unstudied[5].”

With the massive amounts of funding, both private and public, that are devoted towards cancer “research”, it is certainly somewhat troubling to hear the words “known carcinogens”, “environmental contaminants” and “unstudied” used in the same sentence.  The Panel later adds that,

“The prevailing regulatory approach in the United States is reactionary rather than precautionary.  That is, instead of taking preventive action when uncertainty exists about the potential harm a chemical or other environmental contaminant may cause, a hazard must be incontrovertibly demonstrated before action to ameliorate it is initiated….Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in the United States have been tested for safety.[6]”

According to this report, less than one-half of one percent of the potentially carcinogenic chemicals in use in the U.S. have been proven safe.  This is a shocking statistic.  Among the factors influencing this data, the Panel includes “weak laws and regulations, and undue industry influence”, which means that the corporations that are profiting from the use of these potentially deadly chemicals are currently able to suppress regulatory control over their use.

The process of identifying and eliminating environmental causes of cancer has a massive flaw: not only does it fail to generate much capital, but it robs profit not only from the corporations that thrive on perpetuating harmful but highly cost-effective strategies, but also from the industries that subsist on the detection and treatment of the disease.  Financially speaking it is a lose-lose situation.  This results in what the Panel calls a “lack of will to identify and remove hazards”.  At worst, you have a situation as occurred in the case of the toxic chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, used in products like baby bottles and food and beverage can liners.

Extensive research has linked BPA to breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, and other serious medical problems.  The Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction concluded in 2008 that there is’…some concern for effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants and children at current human exposures to bisphenol A’.  Yet in 2008, the FDA ruled the BPA is safe even for infants, based on selected studies[my emphasis], some of which were industry-sponsored, and what is alleged to have been undue influence by industry lobbyists…[7]”

 

Included in the 168 page document as implicated carcinogenic contaminants are:

• Contaminants from industrial and manufacturing sources including
  • Polyhalogenated biphenyls
  • Asbestos
  • Chromium (used in tanning industry)
  • Percholorethylene and trichloroethylene (PCE and TCE, used in dry cleaning)
  • Air pollution
  • Mercury
  • Formaldehyde
  • BPA
  • Phthalates
  • Nanotechnology
  • Contaminants from agricultural sources
    • Pesticides
    • Herbicides
    • Fertilizers
    • Veterinary pharmaceuticals

If you want to truly be part of the cancer prevention community, if you wish to help work towards a cure, you must insist that your efforts and contributions are devoted towards these objectives, not simply detection and treatment.  Clearly, these are not mutually exclusive goals, and we have a sacred obligation to help those unfortunate enough to have gotten cancer.  But if you could make an impact on the life of the future generations, would you rather help your great granddaughter to have a less painful double mastectomy or never have cancer in the first place?  If you answered the latter, you need to advocate for major changes in the way we view and support cancer research and education.  You can be part of that change.

For a good example of a place to start making sure your involvement serves your grandchildren instead of the ambulance service at the bottom of the cliff, check out the National Breast Cancer Coalition at www.knowbreastcancer.org , where they are focused on finding ways to prevent breast cancer from occurring in the first place.  There are other organizations like them out there.  You just have to know to ask the right questions.

 

(read more…)

I want to express my gratitude for the recent article in Seven Days on childhood vaccination rates in Vermont.  This is a critically important issue, and I think we’re all glad that you presented only the mainstream, medico-pharmacological view of the issue as it is the only view that has any truth in it.

 

It is shameful that some parents selfishly choose to not vaccinate their children, when our health care providers and pharmacological corporations have clearly assured us that they are perfectly safe and effective.

 

These deluded parents endanger all of us when they forgo the standard vaccination schedule for such absurd reasons as the concern over the long term health effects of universal vaccination.  The briefest look at vaccine ingredients (comprehensive list available from the CDC at http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipient-table-2.pdf)

would show their fears are ridiculous.

 

For example, the vaccines in the schedule promoted by the Vermont Department of Health include things like formaldehyde, which these foolish parents will always note is the chemical which they use to preserve cadavers.  And they’ll be sure to add that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the National Toxicology Program, an interagency program of the Department of Health and Human Services, named formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen.  So what?  The vaccines that have this chemical may protect their child from pertussis !  (although the vaccine is not 100% effective)  You can listen to a recording of an actual child coughing with pertussis on the CDC website.  Now, I don’t know what cancer rates are in this country but they surely can’t be very high and I don’t know what “cancer” or “cancer treatment” is like but it certainly can’t be worse than that coughing.

 

Other ingredients these vaccine skeptics cite include thimerosal, a mercury derivative and potent neurotoxin and still an ingredient in the flu shot.  I don’t know of any parent who wouldn’t be willing to trade a little brain or nerve damage for a solid 59% potential protection from the flu!  That’s 3 days of missed school in my neighborhood!  The multiple doses of antibiotics in each vaccine are probably perfectly harmless and not, as these wackos suggest, likely to breed resistant strains of germs, no matter what “science” says.  I trust Merck, as should everyone else.

 

Industrial disinfectants like Beta-Propiolactone, chemicals like 2-Phenoxyethanol, an insect repellant also known as antifreeze, and the multiple tissues from monkeys, chickens and cows are likewise unlikely to have long term harmful effects.  Our kids are tough!  Yes, Glutaraldehyde is used to disinfect medical and dental equipment and for industrial water treatment and I’m confident it’s perfectly harmless.  And the fact that the flu shot has Octoxinol-9 is not a concern, it’s a bonus, because Octoxinol-9 is also a vaginal spermicide.  Having that stuff swimming around in your kids blood stream means they will neither get the flu nor pregnant!

 

In the end, Seven Days was right to publish a one-sided story, because it is an issue without nuance.  There is no middle ground between the extremes of wholly unfettered faith in universal- forced if necessary-immunization and rabidly anti-all-vaccines.  Discussions about vaccine ingredients, excipients, schedules and the data around risk/benefits for vaccines for non-life threatening illnesses are meaningless.  There is no centrist position, and no need to question the science-or lack thereof; there is simply the mainstream logic and the lunatic fringe. If we had the same attitude back in the 1800’s, maybe today’s children might still be benefitting from the practice of bloodletting.

 

So, thank you for just showing one side of the vaccine debate- the right side.  Keep up the good work! (read more…)

A recent article in the Burlington Free Press reported on new recommendations from a government panel on cholesterol screenings for younger children.  If you read this article and are aware of the epidemic of obesity in America today and the increasing rates of heart disease in younger and younger patients, the recommendations might seem reasonable.  We’re just screening, after all, and logic follows that the earlier a problem is detected, the more likely intervention will be successful.

 

However, here are some points that might be good to consider:

 

While the study was from a panel appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institute of Health, it was endorsed and promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is not a scientific body but a trade organization of pediatricians.  These are practitioners who stand to benefit financially from a massive influx of new patients for new procedures.  This represents a conflict of interest which is rarely mentioned in discussions of recommendations for care.

 

These recommendations should be drafted by impartial groups who have nothing to gain from the conclusions.  They also should be held to the burden of proof of scientific evidence.  One example of an impartial group of scientists who base recommendations on evidence is the US Preventive Services Task Force.

 

The USPSTF is the panel which has been inflaming the medical screening business by revealing that the risks of screening for things like breast and prostate cancer have been underexamined when trade groups like the AAP make their recommendations.  The big difference between the basis for recommendations from trade groups like the AAP or ACOG, the gynecologists trade group, and the USPSTF is that only one uses science and evidence as a basis for their recommendations and only one has no conflict of interest in the conclusions.

 

When the USPSTF announced that the data showed that routine mammograms are not beneficial for most women under 50, ACOG (the American College of Obstetriciand and Gynecologists) continued their recommendations despite the absence of any compelling evidence to do so.  The fact that reducing such screenings, and the interventions that might follow them would represent a corresponding reduction in revenue for the members of ACOG is a reality that only the most naïve person would ignore.

 

The USPSTF has nothing to gain or lose from any particular conclusion.  Their only burden of proof is…proof.  From the article;

 

“…for the task force to declare screening to be beneficial there must be evidence that treatment improved health, such as preventing heart attacks, rather than just nudging down a number- the cholesterol score.”

 

That evidence, according to the USPSTF, simply does not exist. USPSTF has shown in other realms of health care, such as mammography screening and PSA prostate testing, the risks of screening are usually underestimated: false positives lead to unnecessary intervention, and the tendency for American doctors to resort to drugs or surgery over lifestyle modification leads to overmedication, which has both known and unknown risks.  While the article assured the reader that only a small percentage of kids diagnosed with high cholesterol would be medicated, that seems hard to believe.  Many would find it particularly significant that the photo accompanying the article shows a 10 year old girl who is taking cholesterol lowering medication.

 

It’s clearly a good idea to begin to intervene in the development of unhealthy kids as early as possible.  However, the solution to early development of heart disease is not medical.  It is environmental.  We do not need cholesterol testing on anyone to know that eating a plant-based diet, not smoking, reducing saturated fats and processed foods, getting adequate exercise, and addressing specific social, environmental, psychological and spiritual areas are the primary solutions to the majority of health problems Americans face.   We do not need tests or screening to know that these are important areas of health to address in kids, and not only kids who are diagnosed with a particular value on a blood test, but all kids.  But as Dr. Dean Ornish, cardiologist stated way back in the 1990’s,

 

“In America, more money is spent on treating heart disease than any other illness [$100’s of billions annually]…If I perform bypass surgery on a patient, the insurance company will pay at least $30,000.  If I perform a balloon angioplasty on a patient, the insurance company will pay at least $7,500.  If I spend the same amount of time teaching a heart patient about nutrition and stress management techniques, the insurance company will pay no more than $150.  If I spend that time teaching a well person how to stay healthy, the insurance company will not pay at all.  It’s not surprising that doctors tend to spend time on what is reimbursed, especially since we do not learn much in medical school about nutrition or how to motivate patients to change their lifestyles.  We are not taught skills for coping with stress in our own lives or for teaching these skills to our patients.”

 

This is precisely why not only are these new recommendations missing the mark on preventing heart disease, they illuminate the fact that we are relying on entirely the wrong people to advise us on the matter.  Medical doctors’ training, expertise, orientation and education are all focused on treating illness and disease.  Achieving the true health potential for our nation will require an integrated paradigm in which the vast skills of allopathic medicine in detecting and treating illness, disease and trauma are balanced by the proactive, preventive agencies of other, non-allopathic, wellness-based models for care such as naturopathy, exercise science, chiropractic, Chinese medicine, herbology, and many others.

  (read more…)

Garlic lowers bad cholesterol.  Wait, no it doesn’t.  Hormone replacement therapy lowers the risk of heart disease.  Wait, no it doesn’t- and it increases breast cancer risk.  Taking statins (like Lipitor) when you are healthy will help prevent heart disease.  As it turns out, no.  Drink 8 to 12 glasses of water a day.  Oops- that’s from a single sketchy research paper done in 1947 that has never been substantiated.

John P.A. Ioannidis, chief of the Prevention Research Center at Stanford University, and medicine’s top “mythbuster”, has set out to subject biomedical research to its own standards of proof: evidence and data. 

His question: how many biomedical studies are wrong? 

His answer is shocking: most.

According to Ioannidis, the unbalanced treatment of positive and negative trials (the negative ones being those which show a drug or treatment failing to be effective- these, he discovered, “sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.”) lead to skewed research results.

‘“People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research”, reports Sharon Begley in Newsweek (Jan 24^th, 2011)  Ioannidis’ early work debunked several claims that certain genes were the cause of illnesses like Parkinsons (debunked in 2010) and cardiovascular disease (2009). Begley writes: “Geneticists have mostly mended their ways, tightening statistical criteria, but other fields still need to clean house, Ioannidis says.

“Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly the extent that medications have. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would evaporate if we studied them closely,’ Ioannidis says.”

The take-away from all this is to employ a healthy skepticism toward any medical procedure or treatment that is recommended; do your homework, and, if possible, get a second opinion. 

We small town chiropractors operate under the most ruthless and stringent of evidence protocols: if we fail to get results, we fail to stay in business.  It’s as simple as that.  At RFC, our 18 years of continuing service to our community and unparalleled success in helping our patients achieve their goals for health and healing and happiness is a powerful study in the science of results.  For those for whom clinical studies are important as well, there is a mounting body of evidence that supports regular preventive chiropractic care for health and wellness.  When it all comes out in the wash, we are confident that even the staunchest skeptics will have to acknowledge what our patients have known for years: chiropractic adds years to life and life to years! (read more…)