Eat Dirt

Science is discovering that genetic information/instructions can transfer from microbes to us.  For instance Japanese who eat seaweed can extract nutrients because the bacteria from the seaweed transfers the genetic instructions necessary to properly create the enzymes or whatever is needed to digest this food.

Adaptation to local food is transferred from the soil to us via bacterial genes. 
Our digestive system is in symbiosis with the soil.  As scientists have recently discovered, without the helpful bacteria in our gut, we can not extract the proper nutrients from our food.  Those gut microbes may even play a role as the first defense in our immune system.

This also applies to the soil itself

"Far from being scourges to be avoided at all cost, microorganisms are an essential component of life. We now understand that it is the cooperation between these microorganisms, the soil’s biome, and the plants’ roots, called rhizosphere that is ultimately responsible for allowing the plant to absorb nutrients from the soil in which it’s grown.

Insects and weeds also have their place in this circle of life. According to soil scientist Dr. Arden Andersen, insects are nature’s garbage collectors. Thanks to their specialized digestive systems, which differ from ours, they remove that which is not fit for us to eat—things we cannot digest.

And weeds are nature’s way of evolving the soil—it’s an intermediate plant that mobilizes nutrients in order to alter the soil, making it more suitable for the next evolutionary level of plants to grow in it."

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/12/23/soil-quality.aspx?e_cid=20131223Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20131223Z1&et_cid=DM37598&et_rid=376463815

In Hebrew. this concept of linking Man to Soil is present in the words themselves:
ADaM  - A human being
ADaMaH - The Soil

Adam in the biblical narrative is created from the soil.  In a sense this creation is ongoing as genetic patterns, material and instructions are transferred from the earth's micro-biome to us.

Perhaps that is why, in the Biblical Narrative, certain species were not permitted to be joined into Hybrids.  The resultant bacteria might transfer harmful genetic instructions.

Gene Splicing, in foods, is far more likely to lead to unknown interactions between bacteria and us.  The current Roundup resistant plants are just such a case.  What genetic strangeness is the genetically modified corn, soy etc. conveying to humans?  Not to mention the Roundup itself which destroys bacteria in the soil and in our gut.  Besides a depletion of nutrients due to the killing of soil bacteria , what will the Roundup immune bacteria, which will evolve, do to us?  What are they already doing?

To stay healthy, don't buy animals given antibiotics and food containing GMO.

Antibiotic resistance has been declared a crisis by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Institute of Medicine, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and virtually all other relevant organizations.

The last new antibiotic class for gram-negative bacteria was the quinolones, developed 40 years ago.

Antibiotic abuse in the United States is widespread. We have only 4.6% of the global population but we have 46% of the global antibiotic market.

What can you DO?

Stop Antibiotic Use on the Farm

A full 80% of antibiotic use in the United States is for growth promotion and disease prevention in farm animals. Resistant bacteria and resistance genes can be traced from the chickens to the chicken meat in grocery stores and, finally, to blood cultures in patients (The "farm to fork" phenomenon). The practice of antibiotics for growth promotion on the farm was stopped in Denmark many years ago, with no apparent economic or animal health consequences.

Only buy meat that says no antibiotics used.

Ideally –  Pasture raised - Grass fed and finished, for red meat and organic grain for chickens.

Eat only Foods certified Non-GMO – see below for why.

 

Adopt Rapid Diagnostic Tests

Take a rapid test for bacteria before taking that pill. We  have a test for the detection of MRSA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Chlamydia trachomatis, group B Streptococcus, tuberculosis, Candida albicans, and many others. Coming soon are tests that will detect practically every bacterium as well as other pathogens, making a diagnosis, to facilitate antibiotic decision-making, within 1-2 hours of collecting the culture.

There's always a butt...

initial studies show that antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin, commonly prescribed for 1 week, have a profound and sometimes lasting effect on the colonic microbiome. Furthermore, excessive antibiotics in childhood have been associated strongly with subsequent obesity and inflammatory bowel disease.

 

Take a Probiotic supplement every day to keep the Doctor (and the poo pill) away.

(If you get C-Diff, the solution is to put poo from a healthy host into your colon.)

 

I'm not kidding. 

Your digestive and immune system depend on the good bacteria.

Good bacteria crowd out the bad and you will get sick much less often.

 

You know you are getting enough probiotic, when you pass gas and it doesn't smell.

Yes there are people whose s**t don't smell.

And they are healthier.

 

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GMO isn't a car company.

I am quite skeptical of accepting hype and propaganda.  

Therefore, I do a lot of research before talking about something.

 

At this point, despite the over the top hype about Frankenfood and the like,

 

 

I am convinced that foods which are Genetically Modified, or contains a GMO (Genetically Modified Organism), are a safety and health concern, with a high enough probability of harm, not to take the risk of eating it.  Not all GMO are bad, such as the ones with medical applications, but the ones in the current food supply, that we eat, likely are.

http://www.disabled-world.com/fitness/gm-foods.php

 

Not only is there too high a risk that GMO can make you sick, but there is also a risk that they also may affect how your genes work, altering them to produce harmful substances or debilitate them, and the flaw can pass on to your children.  For more information look up Epigenetics, which is the study of heritable alterations in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in DNA sequence.

 

Additionally, foods with the gene, resistant to Monsanto's Roundup pesticide, are over sprayed and you eat the pesticide.

It is a potent antibiotic and kills the bacteria in your gut that you need for digestion.

Meanwhile the resistant bacteria multiply in your gut and cause problems.

 

A GMO is not a hybrid where the best strains are identified (today with supercomputers sequencing the plant's genome) and allowed to cross pollinate.

A GMO is anything, in this case food, that has a foreign gene sequence (instructions to the cell) spliced into its own genes.

These spliced genes are passed on to the next generation of the food, and when consumed, has an effect on your health and can even affect your genetic structure.

Not to mention the economic and biological danger of terminator genes, that force farmers to buy new seeds every year. 

Seeds from these genetically-modified plants are not viable and therefore unable to produce future crop. 

 

The GMO plants are contaminating other fields of Non-GMO plants causing unwanted alterations to crops and even weeds, with over 60 million acres already affected.

 

Because the Supreme court allowed patenting of GMO, (which also accounts for the proliferation of GMO) this contamination, in our food crops, resulted in patent lawsuits, crop destruction, farm shutdowns and economic chaos in our farm sector.  In this heavily subsidized sector, how much of it is paid for by the taxpayers?  Not to mention that legal fees are passed on to the consumer in prices.

 

 

The main GMO culprits are Corn, Soy, Cotton(seed) and Canola.

These GMO can be found in almost everything, in the form of Corn syrup, sugar, vitamin ingredients, Soy lecithin, soy sauce, oil in snack foods, Meat/Poultry/dairy/eggs from animals that consume GMO food  etc.

The US does not require Labeling of GMO ingredients.

So be careful.

 

 

Resources:

http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-foods/how-to-avoid-gmos

http://www.nongmoproject.org/find-non-gmo/search-participating-products/

 

 

A cure for leukemia and perhaps other cancers

 

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, with the dangerous parts removed, is perfectly designed to invade a cell and allow genetic engineers to reprogram it.

There will be many breakthroughs coming using this technique.  At the moment it looks like there is a successful treatment for Leukemia, even late stage, and possible other type of cancers too. 

There is a new tool that can tell in 2 seconds whether a surgeon is cutting cancer or normal cells during surgery

Latest news from Italy, US and London where the Gene therapy technique is being practiced successfully
 

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Carl H. June, MD

Director, Translational Research Program; Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

 

Medscape: Adoptive immunotherapy, as I understand it, uses a patient's own genetically engineered T cells to treat leukemia in children and adults. Could you describe how the process works?

Dr. June: The protocol involves removing a patient's T cells and reprogramming them to attack tumor cells by genetically modifying them *

 

Medscape: What are the results to date of studies of the gene-transfer technology?

Dr. June: We have 3 phase 1 clinical trials that are ongoing: 2 at the University of Pennsylvania in adults with leukemia and 1 at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in children with leukemia. We are planning to extend these studies to other centers.

The first 2 studies include 12 adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and thus far, 9 of the 12 have had good responses to the gene transfer treatment. We have just concluded the initial study, and the first patient we ever treated, in July 2010, remains in remission. Actually, 2 of the first 3 patients we treated remain in remission, demonstrating that the results are durable.

In the children's study, led by Dr. Stephan Grupp at CHOP, 4 of the first 5 children we have treated have had complete remissions.

 

Medscape: What are the characteristics of the patients who have received the treatment?

Dr. June: We were required by the FDA to initiate the treatment in adults; children were not treated until a year later. In both adults and children, the patients were "end of the line" with advanced leukemia and with no other proven therapeutic options that were available.

Our hope is that if the treatment is effective in patients with late-stage disease, we will be successful, eventually, using it upfront as first-line therapy. Perhaps we could arrive at a point where leukemia can be treated without chemotherapy. Gene transfer therapy with engineered T cells may be an alternative to allogeneic BMT, when BMT is the only resort at present. [BMT - bone marrow transplant]

However, there is still a subset of patients who have been transplanted and then relapse after allogeneic stem cell transplants, and because there is no proven treatment option in this setting, the technique may be useful in those patients as well.

One of the children with pre B-acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in the phase 1 trial that I alluded to had relapsed after allogeneic BMT, and the CAR T cells induced a complete remission.

 

Medscape: What challenges remain in this treatment?

Dr. June: Dosage: Just as we would with other treatments, we need more experience. We don't know the optimal dose of T cells yet. This is more difficult to calculate than for drugs that are metabolized, because the genetically engineered T cells proliferate once they are re-infused into the patient. At the moment, it appears that we have to give a certain threshold number of T cells to the patient. A trial has just begun at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr. David Porter, who has been studying this approach in adults to identify the optimal dose.

We also don't know whether 1 treatment is enough to achieve remission. It may be that maintenance therapy is needed. We don't know yet whether the patients in remission will ever need another treatment. The answers to these questions related to delivery of treatment may be different in children vs adults.

[In my opinion these are minor challenges to a successful treatment]

 

Medscape: What is needed for FDA approval?  [this is always the major challenge]

Dr. June: There is no precedent for FDA approval, so we can only speculate. This would be the first cell-based gene transfer therapy for cancer, representing new ground at FDA. Thus, our main challenge is probably how to go about obtaining FDA approval.

...  Novartis made a major commitment, and now other biotechnology companies have expressed interest in investing in the technology as well.

I am optimistic that the recent industry investment will lead to the eventual widespread availability of the treatment on a broader scale. Our initial results have held up. Excellent results in the first 3 treated patients could have been a chance finding or a statistical fluke, but now we have treated 12 adults and 5 children and have continued to observe a potent activity of the treatment. Perhaps the most important finding is that the responses are durable.

 

Medscape: Do you envision using the genetically engineered T-cell treatment in cancers other than leukemia?

Dr. June: Early-stage pilot trials are being conducted in other cancers at the University of Pennsylvania, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Animal models suggest that the treatment works in other cancers,^[6] but we are in the very early days of learning whether it holds promise for non-B-cell blood cancers and other cancers in humans.

 

If you know someone that has Leukemia, and potentially other cancers, get them to a clinical trial at one of the centers mentioned above. 

You can find other clinical trials here:

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials 

 

My father died from late stage renal cancer for which there was no cure and no treatment at the time he was diagnosed. 

Had he been enrolled in a clinical trial, he might have been saved, as the particular trial, which I only found out about 3 weeks before his death, had a 40% success rate.

 

More technical details of the treatment.

*using an HIV-based lentivirus vector. The vector encodes an antibody-like protein fused to a cytosolic signaling domain, called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which is expressed on the surface of the T cells and designed to bind to the CD19 protein.

When the T cells express the CD19 CAR, they kill cells in the patient's body that express CD19, which includes leukemia cells as well as normal B cells. The modified T cells do not interact with cells that do not express CD19, potentially limiting side effects caused by standard therapies. In addition, the binding of T cells to CD19 initiates the production of cytokines that trigger other T cells to multiply, creating a progressively larger army of T cells to destroy all the target cells in the tumor. Thus, in addition to an extensive capacity for self-replication, the CAR T cells could be called "serial killers."