The Percentage Calories From Protein in Common Plant Foods

Jeff Novick, MS, RD ©2013

The following numbers are from the USDA Standard Reference Release 26, which can be

found here. All items were calculated at 454 grams (1 lb). To see the exact description,

look up the USDA NDB# in the USDA SR 26 Database.

http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list

Vitamin C, lysine and Dr. W. Gifford-Jones

posted on February 14, 2014 by Carolyn Thomas
http://ethicalnag.org/2014/02/14/w-gifford-jones-vitamin-c-lysine/ Author Carolyn Thomas

It all started with a simple question from one of my blog readers at Heart Sisters.  Another heart attack survivor asked me if I’d heard about the use of high-dose vitamin C and lysine to prevent or reverse coronary artery disease, a treatment duo often touted in health food stores. It turns out that almost any Canadian who reads any daily newspaper across our great country has likely heard of these particular supplements, thanks to a syndicated health columnist named W. Gifford-Jones MD whose columns have been published in over 70 newspapers in Canada and beyond.

He’s a University of Toronto- and Harvard-trained MD and author whose bio also includes “family doctor, hotel doctor and ship’s surgeon”. (That’s not his real name, by the way – which is Ken Walker).  In one of his columns published in the Windsor Star in December, the 89-year old Gifford-Jones/Walker described his own personal experience taking this vitamin C and lysine combo:  

“Following a severe coronary attack, cardiologists warned me I’d die without using cholesterol-lowering drugs. Rather,  for the last 16 years I’ve relied on high doses of vitamin C and lysine as recommended by Dr. Linus Pauling. It was a risky decision at that time as there was no evidence that this combination could reverse coronary blockage.

“Now, photos of arteries show that combined vitamin C and lysine not only prevents but also reverses blocked arteries. This combination powder known as Medi-C Plus is available at health food stores.

“It’s a monumental discovery. But this research is collecting dust due to the closed minds of cardiologists who refuse to look at it.”

One of the “closed minds” objecting to this blanket endorsement of Vitamin C and lysine to reverse coronary artery disease belongs to endocrinologist Dr. Raphael Cheung of the Windsor Regional Hospital. He responded to the Windsor Star like this shortly after he read the December column:

“Dr. Gifford-Jones’ anecdotal experience belongs to medicine that was practiced half a century ago!”

But he also spanked the Star itself, asking why the newspaper shouldn’t bear some responsibility for running Gifford-Jones medical columns like this one in the first place:

“Why does (the Windsor Star) keep printing articles written by a retired OB-GYN regarding vascular health? Not knowing any better, there are patients who are at high risk for heart disease and stroke in our community who have stopped taking their medications after reading Gifford-Jones articles.

“While there is always a disclaimer at the end of a Gifford-Jones article that relieves him of any legal liability, the Windsor Star should be held to a higher standard by providing a more balanced approach by at least interviewing a medical expert in the field for another opinion.

“Our motto should be: First do no harm.”

Dr. Cheung also told the Star that he had noticed something else about the unreserved recommendation by Gifford-Jones/Walker of the Medi-C Plus supplement to miraculously prevent and reverse heart disease:

“I was surprised recently when a patient with coronary heart disease told me that he had stopped his heart medications and had started taking Dr. Gifford-Jones’s Medi-C Plus treatment purchased online.”

Suddenly, that folksy anecdote in his syndicated health column has now morphed from casual endorsement to retail marketing tool for the good doctor.

In fact, he’s able to use his considerable public profile (plus his free lectures and online webinars he calls “The Dynamic Duo For Fighting Heart Disease”) to shill his own W. Gifford-Jones MD line of supplements. He recommends that people consume 2-3 scoops of his Medi-C Plus a day; that’s 2,000 mg of vitamin C and 1,300 mg of lysine per scoop.

But evidence suggests that lysine supplements may interact with cardiac medications that can increase bleeding risk, such as anti-coagulant medications like Coumadin or anti-platelet medications like Plavix.  Lysine may also increase the risk of low blood sugar if you take medication for diabetes, and Health Canada warns against taking lysine for more than six months at doses higher than 300 mg per day.

In Canada, we tend to take a dim view of docs who go retail.

Here in my province of British Columbia, for example, our B.C. College of Physicians & Surgeons code of conduct guidelines specifically warn MDs here against the practice, calling it “not only unethical, but constituting a direct conflict of interest”, adding:

“A conflict of interest occurs when a professional or business arrangement provides an opportunity for a physician to receive a personal benefit over and above payment for his or her professional services. Conflict of interest can be direct or indirect, real or perceived, financial or non‐financial.

“Such transactions might reasonably be perceived as self‐serving. Even if there is no direct financial gain for the physician, the selling of products might be considered ethically questionable since patients often believe that a physician’s recommendation naturally implies an endorsement of the product’s value and/or efficacy.”

I’ve added emphasis to that second sentence in the last paragraph because the Gifford-Jones/Walker website claims that sales of Medi-C Plus “help support the Gifford-Jones Professorship in Pain Control and Palliative Care at the University of Toronto.”

We don’t really know what “help support” means in this case. Does it mean that 50% of all Medi-C Plus sales do the “helping” – or just .05% of sales? And why doesn’t he spell this out for consumers?

Either way, much like the B.C. practice guidelines specify, the optics are sketchy even if a physician receives no money personally through retail product sales.

And aside from the pure stomach-churning queaziness surrounding a person with the letters M.D. after his name shilling dietary supplements produced within an entirely unregulated industry (as illustrated in his Twitter page below), there’s also the rather sticky issue of credibility.

Gifford-Jones/Walker cites the work of both Dr. Linus Pauling and Dr. Sydney Bushfor their work on the benefits of mega doses of vitamin C, including its miraculous claim of preventing/curing diseases ranging from the common cold to cancer and heart disease. Pauling himself reportedly took at least 12,000 mg of vitamin C daily, and up to 40,000 mg if symptoms of a cold struck. [1] By comparison, according to the National Institutes of Health, the current Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) for the vitamin is 75 mg per day for women (that’s the equivalent of eating one medium orange) or up to 120 mg if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, and 90 mg for men (about 1/2 cup of red pepper).

But as Dr. Stephen Barrett of QuackWatch reminds us:

“Pauling is largely responsible for the widespread misbelief that high doses of vitamin C are effective against colds and other illnesses. While his basic science work was brilliant and his peace activist work was highly significant, his clinical vitamin C work was never accepted by the medical profession as it failed to withstand the scrutiny of clinical trials.”[2]

“For many years, the largest corporate donor of The Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine that he founded in 1973 was Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical giant that produces most of the world’s vitamin C.”

“Natural products and any claims made about specific products on the site have not been evaluated by the United States Food and Drug Administration nor Health Canada.”

That’s known as a CYA disclaimer, strictly for legal liability protection. It’s like saying that, even though there’s no proof that any claims I make about this stuff is true, I will continue to keep on making them.

Or as Dr. Cheung wrote to the Windsor Star:

Posted by: TLB Staff
advertise here
Published August 9, 2014, filed under HEALTH

by Scepcop

Dr. Niall McLaren, an Australian practicing psychiatrist for 22 years, explains what is wrong with the psychiatric profession: That it cannot/will not take criticism, for fear the entire model of biological psychiatry will unravel.

That there is no science to psychiatric diagnoses, no brain based diseases. And that psychiatry only pushes mental disordersas biological disease in order to convince people to take psychiatric drugs, causing a host of dangerous side effects.

For more psychiatrists/psychologists and doctors who have spoken out against the fraud of psychiatry’s biological model of mental disorders (chemical imbalance, etc) click here:http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-diso … fic-tests/

Psychiatrists, Physicians & Psychologists That Debunk Psychiatry as a Science, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.”

— Allen Frances, Former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman “…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”

— Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist: “There’s no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?”

— Dr. Ron Leifer, psychiatrist“DSM-IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document… DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding.”

— Loren Mosher, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry: “All psychiatrists have in common that when they are caught on camera or on microphone, they cower and admit that there are no such things as chemical imbalances/diseases, or examinations or tests for them. What they do in practice, lying in every instance, abrogating [revoking] the informed consent right of every patient and poisoning them in the name of ‘treatment’ is nothing short of criminal.”

— Dr Fred Baughman Jr., Pediatric Neurologist: “Psychiatry makes unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.”

— Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist : “In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”

— Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK: “I believe, until the public and psychiatry itself see that DSM labels are not only useless as medical ‘diagnoses’ but also have the potential to do great harm—particularly when they are used as means to deny individual freedoms, or as weapons by psychiatrists acting as hired guns for the legal system.” — Dr. Sydney Walker III, psychiatrist

“The way things get into the DSM is not based on blood test or brain scan or physical findings. It’s based on descriptions of behavior. And that’s what the whole psychiatry system is.” — Dr. Colin Ross, psychiatrist

“No biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Depression, Schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling or any other so-called mental illness, disease, or disorder.” — Bruce Levine, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Commonsense Rebellion

“Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV [and ICD-10] are terms arrived at through peer consensus.” — Tana Dineen Ph.D., Canadian psychologist

Intro to Psychiatry: Industry of Death

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Frightening side effects, cover-ups on the record, and no reason to believe they do what they are supposed to

3,000 words, updated 2013
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada bio

Note that recent evidence shows that new generation anti-depressant medications, like escitalopram and sertraline, are probably more safe and more effective than older and better-known SSRIs.1

I believe that I have a professional and moral obligation to question the prescription and widespread use of old-generation (SSRI class) anti-depressant medications such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Luvox. I cannot condemn it: I am not qualified to make that judgement. Condemnation must be left to the credible experts, and their interpretation of the evidence. However, I share my concerns: that the manufacture, marketing, excessive prescription, and sale of these drugs has probably been dangerous and negligent.

This position is well-supported by references to credible and recent scientific opinion and evidence. Credible criticism first came to public attention when David Healy, a professor of psychiatry who lost his job for speaking out about the undeniable risk that SSRIs cause a small percentage of patients to kill themselves, which had not yet been addressed in the scientific literature.2 In January 2008, New England Journal of Medicine reported that drug manufacturers failed to publish every FDA-registered study3 that didn’t make SSRI anti-depressants look good.4 Then PLos Medicine followed up in February with the largest review of SSRI studies to date — including5 all the previously unpublished FDA studies, as discussed byarstechnica.com. The effectiveness of anti-depressants has always been debatable, but this new analysis of all the evidence resulted in a particularly underwhelming picture of the efficacy of these drugs, which appear to be no more effective than sugar pills for most depression6 — though they may be modestly effective for severe depression.7 This is not a new expert opinion, but simply the most recent credible evidence to support an existing opinion. See the footnotes for full details, and please bear in mind the weight of this evidence as you read on.

A personal perspective

I have a personal history with so-called “clinical” depression and bipolar disorder. In 1991, a psychiatrist not only diagnosed me with manic-depression (probably a misdiagnosis), but told me that I would be dead by suicide “within a year” — yikes! — if I did not accept pharmaceutical treatment in the form of SSRI antidepressants. Prozac was three years old then, and had been the most prescribed drug in history as of 1990. I walked out of that psychiatrist’s office, and later cured my own depression and mood swings through personal development.

“Take this mood-altering drug or you’re dead within a year,” was probably not the voice of compassionate wisdom.

Fortunately, I recognized that “take this mood-altering drug or you’re dead within a year” was probably not the voice of compassionate wisdom. But, in fact, it was more dangerous than I knew.

Ely Lily is the manufacturer of Prozac. “The company’s internal documents, some dating to the mid-1980s, as well as government applications and patents, indicate that the pharmaceutical giant has known for years that its best-selling drug [Prozac] could cause suicidal reactions in a small but significant number of patients.”8

Taking Prozac could have induced my suicide rather than preventing it! The same is true for all the millions of people out there ingesting SSRI antidepressants. Scientific controversy about this allegation continues vigorously to this day, as any quick internet search can demonstrate (Google “SSRI suicide”). As long the truth remains elusive, there is a strong “better safe than sorry” case to be made against their use.

Unjustified faith

I have long condemned anti-depressants on the basis of general cynicism. I always knew or suspected that they have numerous alarming side effects, that they are marketed aggressively by some of the most profitable and unaccountable corporations in the world, and that their usage does not have a sound scientific rationale. These have been reason enough to suspect that they are more myth than medicine.

Yet, for all my cynicism, I foolishly had some faith that these drugs could not be all bad. I assumed that their side effects were more or less as reported in drug references, that the manufacturers’ power to obscure the facts is mitigated by government agencies, and that the physiological rationale for the drugs is at least intelligible.

As a health care professional, I have had the opportunity to learn otherwise. I have observed dozens of my own clients struggle with depression both with and without SSRI antidepressants, had numerous conversations with other complementary and conventional health care professionals on the subject, and read many articles and books.

Worse than I’d feared

Contrary to what I once assumed, the side-effects of anti-depressants are actually numerous, severe, potentially life-threatening, and not widely known or even understood. They cause a low but measurable rate of psychotic mania, for instance — equal to millions of people who have been reduced to quivering wrecks, their behaviour drastically altered, careers, marriages and lives lost. Withdrawal symptoms from SSRIs are even more problematic.

The power of the SSRI manufacturers is quite unchecked by government institutions like the American FDA. Indeed, there are documented cases of these companies successfully:

• bribing plaintiffs to make an ineffective case,
• launching dummy lawsuits to create favourable legal precedents, feeding trial subjects Valium to hide severe side effects from the FDA.

This is no surprise given the amount of money and conflicts of interest involved. For instance, President George Bush Sr. was on the board of directors of Eli Lilly & Co. (Prozac), and the head of the FDA during the Prozac approval now works for the pharmaceutical industry as a consultant!

Finally, the scientific rationale for anti-depressants is not, it turns out, very good at all. It is as clumsy as the rationale for electroshock therapy and lobotomy was historically. The popularity of anti-depressants is a continuation of the historical tendency to use “brain-disabling treatments” in psychiatry.9

It is important to understand that SSRIs quite literally just “mess with your head,” specifically interfering with the function of a common messenger molecule (serotonin), one of thousands of others, whose purpose and broad significance to brain function in general is only vaguely understood, and whose particular significance to depression is completely unknown. Consider this 2010 article in New Scientist, emphasizing how recent research has only emphasized our ignorance:

If you thought depression was caused by low serotonin levels, think again. It looks as if the brain chemistry of a depressed person is much more complex, with mounting evidence suggesting that too much serotonin in some brain regions is to blame.

The most sophisticated method known for even measuring serotonin levels in the brain — never mind understanding the significance of these measurements — is to grind up a piece of brain, spin it in a centrifuge, and measure the sum total of serotonin relative to other substances. And how about our ability to measure the amount of serotonin in any given synapse at any time? Exactly zero. Yet the marketing of these drugs would have us believe that they are extremely specific in their effects. It is simply not so.

Despite the commercials — treating depression pharmacologically is not treating something as simple as a low level of a single neurotransmitter. Measuring serotonin levels, even if practical, would likely be of no clinical value. Depression is a result of poor emotional regulation among various brain regions. Drugs are a blunt tool by which we can nudge brain function in a direction which, for some people, can change this regulation and reduce depression. It’s not really about the levels.

Dr. Steven Novella, Yale neurologist, from comments on Antidepressants and Effect Size

Given these limitations, the idea that we can diagnose a “chemical imbalance” in the brain is pure nonsese — even if we could measure it, we don’t know what normal brain chemistry is. Bear in mind also that no psychiatrist actually attempts to measure your brain chemistry before prescribing SSRIs. They don’t do it, of course, because they have not the slightest idea how to diagnose allegedly dysfunctional neurochemistry. They infer the idea of dysfunctional neurochemistry from your subjective symptoms (i.e. depression). That idea has achieved an outrageously disproprotionate credibility, seeming like certain knowledge to the layperson, when it fact the reality is that the nature of sertonin and related neurotransmitters remain almost completely mysterious to medical science.

The concept of a “chemical imbalance” in the human brain is one of the most fantastic oversimplifications in science, and one of the worst legacies of the modern pharmaceutical industry. A bowl of soup could have a chemical imbalance …

— the anonymous neuroscientist blogger Neuroskeptic, from an entertaining essay offering terrific perspective on this topic: The Brain Is Not Made Of Soup

We do not prescribe medicines to “treat” brain chemistry, we prescribe medications that messwith it — to rock the boat, stir the soup — not because we know what to do to brain chemistry, but because it is something that we can do to brain chemistry. The precision is in the mechanism of effect, and not the consequences.

Indeed, the scientific rationale for these drugs is so bankrupt that to even call them “antidepressants” has more to do with marketing than science, and various studies have shown that they simply do not work as advertised.10 Antidepressants are, in fact, closely related to amphetamines like ecstasy and cocaine. Cocaine essentially does exactly the same kinds of things to the brain, only it messes with serotonin plus a few other molecules. You can think of anti-depressants as “simplified cocaine.” And also “legal cocaine.” It’s an incredibly blunt medical instrument that does not do anything except generally interfere with normal brain function.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to carefully “tinker” with your brain. Humans have a long history of finding ways to mess with our own heads. There are times in life when almost any change in mental state feels like an upgrade. But we need to be more realistic and acknowledge that this is what we’re really doing with SSRIs.

My responsibility as a health care professional

If the allegations against them are correct — and they seem to be — the presence and typical usage of these drugs in our society is just as unconsciounable as any snake oil ever was, only worse because of the massive scale. Too often we think of our civilization as scientifically sophisticated in all fields. Yet neurophysiology is still primitive in many ways, lacking in testable theories with the power to explain many mental phenomena — yet touted (marketed) as advanced. Consequently, medical malpractice is still common. It’s my responsibility as a health care professional to raise these concerns, even though there are more credible voices to be heard.

Indeed, please do not take my word for it. Although under-reported in the past, lately all of this information is readily available from other and more credible sources. If you are considering antidepressant medication, please do your homework first. If you are already taking antidepressant medication and want to quit safely, it is not sufficient to simply ask your physician. You must educate yourself.