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For starters, the decision was made by city leaders who say their TAP WATER is what people should be drinking, not bottled water.
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Here's something that's not debatable: While banning bottled water, the city of Toronto did NOT ban diet soda and soft drink beverages.
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Toronto, in all its short-sighted wisdom, has now granted the soda companies a virtual monopoly on beverages sold at the local arenas. With no bottled water available, what do they think people are going to drink instead? Soda, of course. Loaded with phosphoric acid (causes osteoporosis), high-fructose corn syrup (diabetes) and maybe even aspartame (neurological disorders).

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“Toronto’s decision to ban the bottle and turn on the tap sends a clear message that bottled water’s 15 minutes are up, the marketing scam is out of the closet, and it’s time to go back to the tap,” says Joe Cressy, Campaigns Coordinator for the Polaris Institute.

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Despite receiving accolades from anti-tobacco advocates, Ontario's ban isn't sitting well with some cigarette retailers.

"It sucks. Literally. It's just plain dumb," said Phil Doucette, an employee at Crown Variety in downtown Toronto. "It's a legal product. Why should we have to hide it?"

Doucette, a smoker himself, thinks the ban won't stop young people from lighting up.

"If they want to smoke, they're going to. If they don't, they won't. But it ain't going to stop them."

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I know I'm going to get hate mail for this, but it deserves to be said...

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Up to 90 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States may be contaminated with trace amounts of melamine
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Prior to these test results being made public, the FDA had published a document on its website that explained there was no safe level of melamine contamination in infant formula. Specifically, the FDA stated, “FDA is currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns.”

Once tests found melamine in U.S.-made formula products, however, the FDA changed its story. As of today, the FDA has now officially declared melamine to be safe in infant formula as long as the contamination level is less than one part per million (1 ppm).

Astonishingly: The FDA has no new science to justify its abrupt decision declaring melamine to be safe!
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The “acceptable” level of contamination (1 ppm) is conveniently just above the levels found in U.S. infant formula products, thus placing U.S. infant formula in the “safe” contamination level category.

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(NaturalNews) The FDA Amendments Act (FDAAA) was signed into law last year requiring the FDA to make improvements on food safety for people and pets. The first deadline required by the Amendments Act law, requiring an Early Warning and Notification System during a pet food recall, has come and gone seemingly ignored by the FDA.

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The European Commission said that wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years and 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 percent of them.

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Documents revealed by Sen. Charles Grassley's office show that the drug company Wyeth paid ghost writers to author medical journal articles hyping up the benefits of its HRT drug Prempro.

Sen. Grassley's office produced "dozens of pages" of internal documents showing the collusion between Wyeth and a firm called DesignWrite that earns money by producing what it calls "educational" content.

The New York Times is reporting (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/busin...) that one such article was published as an "Editor's Choice" feature in the May, 2003 edition of The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. That article claimed there was no link between Wyeth's drug and breast cancer, even though a federal study called the Women's Health Initiative had just concluded that, in fact, Prempro was linked to breast cancer.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Coca-Cola plans to launch a calorie-free, stevia-sweetened drink this week. Why is that news? Because stevia has never been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has kept stevia off the GRAS list of approved food and beverage ingredients for well over a decade (to protect aspartame profits, critics charge).

If Coca-Cola moves ahead with its plan to launch a stevia-sweetened diet drink, it would be doing so in direct violation of FDA regulations that currently prohibit stevia from being used as an ingredient in food and beverages (stevia can only be sold as a "dietary supplement," not as an ingredient in food). This means one of the following must be true:

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If Possibility #2 is true, then the FDA will be faced with a dilemma: It must either confiscate all of Coca-Cola's stevia drinks or it will lose any remaining credibility as a food and beverage regulator. Why? Because it has threatened smaller stevia companies for years, even confiscating imported stevia products and ordering the destruction of stevia recipe books. If it now allows Coca-Cola to sell stevia drinks even when they are using an illegal ingredient, it would indicate blatant favoritism of large corporations over small ones.

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Today, the medical journal Nature decided to turn tricks for its Big Pharma pimp by publishing one of the most outrageous pieces of pro-Pharma fluffery you'll ever find in print. It gathered seven scientists -- two of them admittedly on Big Pharma's payroll -- to say that doctors should be able to prescribe psychotropic drugs (like the ADHD drugs being given to children today) to healthy people in order to "improve brain function."

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As President Barack Obama is sworn in on January 20th, FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach will be doing something on the same day: Quietly slipping out the back door of the FDA.
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In any case, it's apparent that many corrupt Bush appointees are fleeing Washington before the Obama swearing in. It's happening at the EPA, too, where politicians are being replaced with -- gasp! -- scientists.

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FDA Stuns Scientists, Declares Mercury in Fish to be Safe for Infants, Children, Expectant Mothers!
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This FDA decision on mercury in fish has alarmed EPA scientists who called it "scientifically flawed and inadequate," reports the Washington Post. Even better, the Environmental Working Group (www.EWG.org) issued a letter to the EPA, saying "It's a commentary on how low FDA has sunk as an agency. It was once a fierce protector of America's health, and now it's nothing more than a patsy for polluters."

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You want to know the REAL reason the FDA is easing up on its warning about mercury in fish? It's because the agency is being relentlessly pounded over two related issues: Mercury in dental fillings and mercury preservatives in vaccines. And the FDA can't keep up its lie about the "safety" of vaccines and mercury fillings if it has already declared mercury to be dangerous in fish, right?

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted GRAS approval for a natural, zero-calorie sweetener it once sought to wipe out from the U.S. marketplace. Following political pressure from powerful consumer product corporations (Coca-Cola and Pepsi, primarily), the FDA has once again fallen in step with the interests of Big Business and legalized a food and beverage ingredient that it once aggressively oppressed.

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There is some speculation that the patented stevia being used by Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other big businesses is in some way less natural than the traditional stevia we've been buying at health food stores for years. Some have wondered how their patented stevia (Truvia) could actually be patented unless there were some synthetic molecules in it.
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Watch for stevia-sweetened products to appear on store shelves everywhere. You'll also see lots of formulations that will combine stevia with other sweeteners to provide higher sweetness with fewer overall calories (and a lower glycemic index).

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I would rather drink bitter drinks than support these megalithic companies that want to patent the rights to the plants that grow in this Earth!

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In fact, the approval of stevia is paving the way for the banning of aspartame! And I predict aspartame will eventually be banned or removed from the GRAS list

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(NaturalNews) A prominent psychiatric doctor who promoted antidepressant drugs has been stripped of his chairmanship at Emory University (again!) after investigators from Senator Charles Grassley's office uncovered secret financial ties to Big Pharma.

Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff received $800,000 from GlaxoSmithKline, but failed to accurately report the income, say investigators from Grassley's office. When Emory University learned of the lapse in professional ethics, it stripped Nemeroff of his valuable chairmanship and permanently barred him from his post.

Notably, he was not fired from his job, nor barred from practicing psychiatric medicine, which just goes to show you that the practice of doctors maintaining financial ties to drug companies is openly tolerated by both state medical authorities and Emory University.

Dr. Nemeroff is barred from applying for grants from the National Institutes of Health for two years.

Nemeroff's forays into undisclosed financial gain are nothing new: In 2006, he was caught in similar under-the-table financial gains involving a medical device manufacturer named Cyberonics. (http://www.naturalnews.com/020213.html)
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You want to know what's really interesting about all this? Nemeroff then apparently regained his chairmanship sometime between 2006 and 2008 because in this most recently scandal, he was fired from the same position he resigned from in 2006!

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An examination of internal Bayer company documents by The New York Times reveals that the company was engaged in unsavory, probably criminal marketing practices. The documents reveal that Bayer continued to sell contaminated blood plasma causing thousands of hemophiliac patients to be infected with AIDS. The company continued to sell the contaminated blood in Asia for over a year when it had already introduced a safer, heated blood plasma version in the US and Europe in February 1984.

The documents examined by the Times provide evidence of unrestrained corrupt practices by a pharmaceutical industry giant. According to The Times, records suggest that the reason for continuing to sell an AIDS infected blood product, was to get rid of inventory and "the company hoped to preserve the profit margin from 'several large fixed-price contracts.'"

This previously uninvestigated case demonstrates how this industry's lies and crimes are shielded by officials at the Food and Drug Administration. The Times reports that in 1985 FDA's Dr. Harry Meyer willingly helped Bayer cover up "one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history." Meyer suggested that the issue should be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public." This culture of accommodation continues to prevail at the FDA.

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Participants in the forum heard Howard Wyers, owner of a health care benefits administrator in Michigan, speak of his efforts to encourage employees to quit smoking by offering incentives. When that did not deliver the results he wanted, Wyers told his 200 employees that he would no longer hire any smokers, and that anyone who did not quit smoking in the next 15 months would be fired. Eventually, he applied the rule to employees' spouses as well.

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Participants in the forum heard Howard Wyers, owner of a health care benefits administrator in Michigan, speak of his efforts to encourage employees to quit smoking by offering incentives. When that did not deliver the results he wanted, Wyers told his 200 employees that he would no longer hire any smokers, and that anyone who did not quit smoking in the next 15 months would be fired. Eventually, he applied the rule to employees' spouses as well.

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John Harris, professor of bioethics and director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester is at it again, pushing for drug use by college students who want to "enhance their brain power" before exams. What drugs should they be taking? Amphetamines, he says! (Speed)
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They should only be able to buy Big Pharma's amphetamines that just happen to make a ton of money for the drug companies.
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Conventional medicine is now pushing hard for the legalization of mind-altering drugs to be used by students. It was only a few weeks ago that the medical journal Nature published a highly-publicized editorial authored by several doctors (including John Harris) who strongly advocated the use of Ritalin and other mind-altering drugs by students

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When the bioethics professors are recommending the mass-drugging of college students, that's when you know Big Pharma has taken over the world of academia.

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President-elect Barack Obama is prowling for a new head for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

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The need for change could collide with the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry, which donates millions to politicians every year.

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ORIGINAL: DayStar43
If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny"
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

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After a decade of pressure from a consumer advocacy group, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will require the food industry to disclose a little known fact: The food dye that goes by the name of carmine - and several other aliases - is made from the crushed bodies of the cochineal insect.

Starting in two years, food manufacturers will have to disclose cochineal-based food additives on their labels. The FDA created the new rule because people who've consumed products that range from yogurt to fruit drinks to candy have developed severe allergic reactions, some of which have been potentially fatal.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — In an unusually blunt letter, a group of federal scientists is complaining to the Obama transition team of widespread managerial misconduct in a division of the Food and Drug Administration.

"The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the scientific review process for medical devices at the FDA has been corrupted and distorted by current FDA managers, thereby placing the American people at risk," said the letter, dated Wednesday and written on the agency's Center for Devices and Radiological Health letterhead.
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In their letter the FDA dissidents alleged that agency managers use intimidation to squelch scientific debate, leading to the approval of medical devices whose effectiveness is questionable and which may not be entirely safe.

"Managers with incompatible, discordant and irrelevant scientific and clinical expertise in devices...have ignored serious safety and effectiveness concerns of FDA experts," the letter said. "Managers have ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify scientific evaluations, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the laws, rules and regulations, and to accept clinical and technical data that is not scientifically valid."
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"Currently, there is an atmosphere at FDA in which the honest employee fears the dishonest employee, and not the other way around," the scientists wrote.
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Top FDA managers "committed the most outrageous misconduct by ordering, coercing and intimidating FDA physicians and scientists to recommend approval, and then retaliating when the physicians and scientists refused to go along," the letter said.

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Drugs that receive FDA approval right before deadline are more likely to cause serious side effects than those approved with more time to spare, according to a study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

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But some legislators weren’t buying that. Rep. John Shimkus (R., Ill.) told the WSJ: “To remove managers for two days to discuss this morale problem, instead of putting food and drug safety first, is ridiculous.”

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Some lawmakers are fuming about a $1.5 million contract for morale-boosting that the FDA awarded the consultant that prepared the slideshow....

Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, said of the slide presentation: "It's a cinch that if I spent a nickel of taxpayers' money to rank myself with [Sam] Houston and [Stephen F.] Austin, I'd have some explaining to do after the laughter died down."

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The FDA approved two versions of a new zero-calorie sweetener developed by the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.

Cargill, which is marketing the sweetener Truvia from Coca-Cola, received notification from the FDA that it had no objection to the product, calling it “generally recognized as safe.”

PepsiCo said it also had received a similar letter and the same “generally recognized as safe” designation for its sweetener, PureVia.

Both products use rebiana, an extract from the stevia plant.