AlternativesMagazine

Americans are getting fatter, and older. These converging trends are putting the USA on the path to an alarming health crisis: Nearly half of adults have either pre-diabetes or diabetes, raising their risk of heart attacks, blindness, amputations and cancer. Federal health statistics show that 12.3% of Americans 20 and older have diabetes, either diagnosed or undiagnosed. Another 37% have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood sugar. That's up from 27% a decade ago. An analysis of 16 studies involving almost 900,000 people worldwide, published in the current issue of the journal Diabetologia, shows pre-diabetes not only sets the stage for diabetes but also increases the risk of cancer by 15%. "It's bad everywhere," says Philip Kern, director of the Barnstable Brown Diabetes and Obesity Center at the University of Kentucky. "You almost have the perfect storm of an aging population and a population growing more obese, plus fewer reasons t

  In  USA TODAY an article appeared, "What If Cancer Simply Can't Be Cured." Over the past 10 years we've featured many articles about cancer, it's cures, the fraud involved and many other aspects of this deadly disease. It seems like the medical profession and the cancer research institutions are hell bent in finding a cure simply through chemistry. And most of us agree the reason for that is because of the buck$. We very rarely hear anything from the medical side or big pharma that changing our lifestyle, eating a proper diet and doing a little exercise might go along way in preventing, not only cancer but many catastrophic diseases.  During this 10 period of following the growing cancer epidemic, we've heard many documented stories from cancer patients who were given the standard "X amount of time to live story," which usually came after the chemo, after radiation, after surgery and after their money ran out. Instead many decided to fore-

  An industry-funded study claims that diet soda drinkers lose weight faster than those who don’t drink ANY soda at all The study comes on the heels of rapid reductions in diet soda sales. Last year, diet Coke and diet Pepsi both dropped by nearly seven percent Research over the last 30 years has repeatedly shown that artificially sweetened no- or low-calorie drinks and other “diet” foods tend to stimulate your appetite, increase cravings for carbs, and stimulate fat storage and weight gain Studies have also linked diet drinks and artificial sweeteners to a number of other, more serious health hazards, including increased risk of stroke and cancer Artificial sweeteners trick your body into thinking that it’s going to receive sugar (calories), but when the sugar doesn’t arrive, your body signals that it needs more, which results in carb cravings.  Read the entire article from the August 15, 2014 Dr. Mercola newsletter. Click HERE . 

Approximately 400,000 people in and around Toledo, Ohio are being warned not to drink their tap water after high levels of a dangerous toxin were discovered in the water supply Saturday, according to the Toledo-Lucas County Department of Health. The toxin is called microcystin, the high levels of which were caused by massive increases in algae on Lake Erie. The increases in algae, called “algae blooms”, are poisonous if consumed — causing abnormal liver function, diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, numbness, and dizziness. Boiling the water doesn’t help — in fact, it increases the presence of the toxin. Experts say one of the biggest reasons for the severity of this algal bloom is excess phosphorus runoff from urban and industrial agricultural lands, as well as from waste water from sewage treatment plants As of now, it’s unclear when Toledo residents will have clean water again. According to the Toledo Blade , fresh water samples are being flown to a specialized U.S. Environmental Protectio

Fryeburg, Maine residents pour out bottled water in protest of Poland Spring diverting the town's aquifer When Nestlé subsidiary Poland Spring came to the tiny town of Fryeburg, Maine, USA nearly a decade ago, residents noticed that their water was vanishing. Lake levels were lowering. Streams were getting smaller. Nestlé was pumping the aquifer under their town for all it could get. A battle over corporate privatization of our natural water resources When the citizens of Fryeburg spoke up, Nestlé unleashed an aggressive, divide-and-conquer strategy. It sued the town, nearly bankrupting several local activists. It worked to ensure that local regulatory boards were friendly to its position and it took its case all the way to the state Supreme Court. But Nestlé also set up a Poland Spring shop for local outreach, and established the Fryeburg Business Association -- staffed by a Nestlé employee -- to lead a charm offensive. Local schools even have a bottled water vending mac

By Jim Meyer Finland's capital hopes a 'mobility on demand' system that integrates all forms of shared and public transport in a single payment network could essentially render private cars obsolete.   The Finnish capital has announced plans to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point "mobility on demand" system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car. Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use. Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitt

By Emily Thomas Huffington Post  According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Ameri can families throw out about 25 percent of their groceries each year , often because they don't maximize the food's full use -- for example, some people throw away broccoli stems and only use the florets -- or they don't know how to store perishable items correctly. What's more, according to the World Resources Institute, about one-third of all food produced worldwide gets lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems annually. Josh Treuhaft, a recent master's graduate of the Design For Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts, first cooked up the supper club idea for his thesis project, "Eat Everything." He then decided to test out the concept on a bigger audience. "There’s all these people in [New York City] who spend extraordinary amounts on food, spend hours talking about their food and taking pictures of their food,"

From: Why Don't You Try This? No-one will believe the idea that something so cheap and simple such as Baking Soda can exceed the effectiveness of even the most expensive pharmaceutical drugs. At one stage it was common knowledge that baking soda could easily cure a common cold, as well as support a number of other ailments. I have heard stories of people who have sworn it to have rid their cancer.  There are 1000s of reasons to use baking soda but one overall reason is that sodium bicarbonate is a natural substance that will not harm us, our children or the environment because is it not a chemical compound that effects nature in any kind of negative way.  Baking soda is a compound that is found throughout nature, in the ocean, in the soil, in our foods and in our bodies. Baking soda is a neutralizer of many other compounds, this makes it exceptionally effective as a medicine in the age of toxicity.  Baking Soda (Sodium bicarbonate) is already in wide use and has been f

The Man Who Lives Without Money Read More: http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/10/the-man-who-lives-without-money.html The Man Who Lives Without Money Read More: http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/10/the-man-who-lives-without-money.htm "If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn't shit in it." Irishman Mark Boyle tried to live life with no income, no bank balance and no spending. Here's how he finds it. The man who lives without money. If someone told me seven years ago, in my final year of a business and economics degree, that I'd now be living without money, I'd have probably choked on my microwaved ready meal. The plan back then was to get a ‘good' job, make as much money as possible, and buy the stuff that would show society I was successful. For a while I did it – I had a fantastic job managing a big organic food company; had myself a yacht on the harbour. If it hadn't been for the chance purchase of a video called

By C-A Moss  In my quest to extend my vegan compassion to other areas of my consumerism, I’ve circled back to minimalism, which for many years, played a prominent role in my belief structure. Researching for this article, I found an abundance of blog entries and youtube videos of people identifying as minimalist in various forms. Ending excessive consumption. Rejecting capitalism. Life editing. Zero-waste lifestyle. Decluttering. Anti-materialism. Living deliberately. Spartanism. Deattachment. Thriving with less. Living within your needs. I’ve experienced many challenges and fails over these first eight months of the Ethical Closet Project [ http://thedreamyidealist.com/theethicalclosetproject /]. I’ve accepted that our culture sets us up to fail but I’m still determined to find a loophole in the system that doesn’t include voluntary poverty. Consuming even less, and only what is essential, may be the path to greatly reducing my participation in the exploitation tha

WALKING, WHAT A NOVEL IDEA . . . . A few major cities are making some surprising and unexpected shifts toward walkable urban development. Walkable neighborhoods are defined as those where everyday destinations such as home, work, school, stores and restaurants are concentrated and within walking distance. Planners and residents who once opposed dense urban spaces are shifting gears. Neighborhood groups mobilized around a major new development and demanded higher density "because they wanted great urbanism that their kids could walk to." Who's to blame for all this common sense? Kids! the Millennials … are driving this. And we thought all they did was sit around texting.  The average American household spends over $8,000 per year on owning and driving their cars, that's more than they spend on food. Furthermore traffic congestion wastes nearly 3 billion gallons of gas per year in the U.S. If there is anything that will get the attention of the oil ba

it's about prevention "Why is "diet and exercise" always part of the rehab procedure AFTER a diagnosis, or recovering from a major illness?"  "Why do most pharmaceutical drugs include the fine print disclaimer:  "if combined with a proper diet and exercise?"  (it usually appears right before the list of it's deadly side effects). ....... I f diet and exercise is so important AFTER being cut, poisoned or burned,  why not go there FIRST and eliminate the middle men? This is the message of BIKE SATURDAYS. Join us on the Whitefish Trail, Saturday June 21 CLOSING NOTE: This how naive we've become about the cause and effect of cancer and how corporate "pink washing" has taken over at the expense of women with breast cancer. KFC Chicken is a major sponsor of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure . Raising money in the name of breast cancer research, while engaged in a partnership with a corporation that ma

Safety is usually the biggest reason why more people don't bike. True, biking isn't all that dangerous compared to being a pedestrian, but it seems much more dangerous — especially to people who haven't ridden in traffic or been on a bike much since childhood. Research shows the lanes make new bikers feel safer about biking   Luckily, we have a cutting-edge technology that can solve this problem: protected bike lanes. Though some European cities began installing these bike lanes — which are physically separated from the street by a curb or barrier — during the 1970s and 80s , relatively few of them existed in the US until recently. Over the past few years, though, American cities have begun building them in record numbers. And if the goal of these lanes is to get more people biking, research shows they work. A new study of eight recently-installed protected bike lanes in Austin, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, DC shows they encouraged substant