I know one of those. And of course she knows better than everyone else.

article on snopes about atkins death:
http://www.snopes.com/medical/doctor/atkins.asp

That actually is a disappointing article. snopes.com is usually a lot less biased than that. It's not that anything is really inaccurate, but the wrong things are most assuredly highlighted. Oh, and his health condition COULD be determined since Veronica Atkins did release his health records.

the one similarity that many people share across a wide variety of diets and weights is coffee, and that has plenty of natural carcinogens in it, as well as acrylamide, and toxic pesticide residues, as the third most heavily sprayed crop (after tobacco and cotton)

Usually coffee is touted as cancer fighting; e.g. this link - have you encountered any studies that established a link between coffee consumption and cancer?

Just that it is loaded with carcinogens and is powerfully addictive

Coffee consumption and all causes of death:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/...11/ai_12673616/

There is always something that is going to kill you - I could walk out of my house and be flattened by a bus!!

I can go days without coffee and no effect - I have done it but I enjoy the taste as well as red meat but I have never smoked but was around smokers growing up all my life so I feel I have a better chance of dying because of my exposure to 2nd hand smoke than my coffee in the morning.

But to each his own - I want to enjoy the time I have on earth because no one knows how long or short that may be.

I remember when my deodorant was going to kill me - that also causes cancer I guess but I'm not giving that up either for the sake of my co-workers and family PHEW!!

According to Dr Schwarzbein of "The Schwarzbein Principle" fame, the problem with coffee is that it increases your adrenaline levels, prevents the breakdown of adrenaline and makes whatever adrenaline is in your system more potent.

Adrenaline itself is highly addictive, hence the astronomic growth of Starbucks' outlets across the planet: caffeine consumption has made us all into adrenaline junkies!!!

I think that the chances are high that many scientists and medical doctors are, or have been, certainly during their times as interns, adrenaline/caffeine junkies. They probably used caffeine to keep going during the day (and night, if on these ridiculous 72-hour shifts) and alcohol to wind down after their shifts finally ended or at night after a long day.

I think the chances are also high that most doctors are aware of the dangers of excessive consumption of both caffeine and alcohol, but - being human - would love to kid themselves that there might be a benefit in drinking them after all, so that they can justfiy their behaviour to themselves.

What better way to do that than to do one of these terrible epidemiological studies which, when it comes to matters of nutrition, have virtually no value whatsoever?

There may not be any studies out proving a link between caffeine and cancer, but decades of high adrenaline levels make you age faster. If you age faster, you die sooner than you otherwise would have done.

And, if coffee was so healthy, why do most adults never give it to their kids? We instinctively know that the instant jolt that you get from your morning coffee is not going to be good for kids.

I am now trying to tell myself that if I was able to function perfectly well as a child with neither caffeine (OK, we drank a couple of cups of tea a day as kids, my sister and me, but no coffee) nor alcohol, then this must be possible for me as an adult. There is no physiological need whatsoever for these drugs, but they have become so socially acceptable that it is practically a must today for all adults to drink coffee and alcohol, whether they want to or not!

my two cents
amanda

Hi Joylorene,

You wrote this:



Absolutely! I agree 100% that we cannot protect ourselves from all risks. But we can protect ourselves from known ones. We all have to make individual decisions as to which risks we consider greatest.



Well, even if the deodorant isn't going to give you cancer, it may still be wreaking havoc in your brain if you are using one of those deodorants with aluminium in it, which has been found in the brains of people who had suffered from Alzheimer's. Aluminium has also been found in breast tissue, having got there from the nearby armpits. Whether this foreign substance then predisposes that tissue to become cancerous is anybody's guess, but I personally don't like the idea of bits of metal floating around in my tits.

There are deodorants which don't contain aluminium, which maybe don't work for as long as the ones with aluminium in, but all you need to do is to wash your armpits more regularly if you notice you're getting smelly. Here in the western world, it is generally easy to access running water, so that shouldn't be a problem for most of us. If not, you can always discreetly use a travel wipe to "wash" yourself.

The deodorants with aluminium in them block or constrict the sweat ducts in your armpits so that you basically don't sweat, but I always ask myself if it is really a good idea to stop the body doing its work the way nature intended it to. Presumably, if it is hot, the sweat gets produced anyway, but what is happening to the sweat that should be going out via your armpits??? It must be going somewhere and presumably it is not exiting your body the way it is meant to, or it is pooling in some stagnant pit somewhere inside the body, doing some kind of damage, for all we know!

And, as for the pong produced by sweaty armpits, I personally find the smell of "normal" deodorant sprays absolutely vile!!! If I had to choose, I think I'd rather put up with the smell of armpits than the smell of these toxic chemicals.

My teenage daughter complained that the aluminium-free deodorants I had got for her "didn't work" and bought herself a new one, which I then discovered does have aluminium in it. Admittedly, her clothes no longer smell of sweat after a day, but of this vile deodorant instead, but after she sprays the stuff on in the morning, I have to air the entire house! YEURCH!

As she is a teenager, she is absolutely impervious to good advice at the moment, so I think the chances of my convincing her to stop using these aluminium deodorants are very low, although I may insist that she get a roll-on in order to stop ponging the house out.

She has also stopped wearing a bike helmet ("it messes up my hair") even though her own father had multiple skull fractures after a fall from his bike just two years ago when he wasn't wearing a helmet. He narrowly escaped an awful fate, for which we are all extremely grateful, but it was dang close. He was operated on by neurosurgeons and has - so far at least - had no side-effects from the accident. But you would really think that having seen her father in hospital with all his injuries would have taught her a lesson, but no!

But, teenagers aside, as informed adults we should be capable of making wise decisions about the extent to which we deliberately expose ourselves to toxins.

amanda

Yeah, I guess that would be sort of like me (292 pounds) telling my 6-foot-tall and 125-lb sister that she would be healthier if she gave up all the white flour, sugar and legumes that she eats and embraced a low carb diet.

The association between Alzheimers and aluminium has been pretty much proven to be coincidental.

Yeh, I think current thought is going to elevated blood sugar as the cause of Alzheimers.

Point taken, but I still don't want it lurking in my boobs, even if it is apparently perfectly OK for it to be wandering around my brain...

amanda

Thank you for that link! It's not deodorants that are the problem, it's anti-perspirants. I tried to switch from anti-perspirants to deodorants a few years back because of the fear of aluminum causing Alzheimer's, but I simply can't stand to feel damp under my arms and eventually switched back. Every morning as I swipe it on, I think, "Well, I hope my diet counteracts the aluminum in this stuff."

One less thing to worry about.