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A very happy, healthy West Wind Farms cow!
So you’ve been around the web. You’ve read about why raw milk is better than the stuff you buy in the store. You’ve read the books and visited rawmilk.org and realmilk.com. Maybe you even know where you can pick some up because you’ve been to the WAPF site and looked up your local chapter contact and asked. But, for one reason or another you’ve been putting if off. You’re at the grocery store anyway, and picking up real milk at the farm is just another errand, or the budget is just too tight this week, or whatever.
But let me light a fire under you. NOW is the perfect time to make the move and take that step. Look at that happy cow up there, grazing on that tall grass. That fast-growing grass is full of a special precursor to vitamin K2, that cows turn into milk full of the vitamin. K2 is a special vitamin, misunderstood and greatly ignored by the medical and science communities outside of those continuing the work of Weston A. Price.
Get thee to a library, check out a copy of Nourishing Traditions, read it cover to cover (it won’t take as long as you might think) and then make that phone call. Special milk like this happens only once a year (twice in a few amazing places) and you don’t want to miss out!
Note to teenaged son: Yes, you guessed it. The few weeks Dad insists you mow the lawn twice a week do happen to coincide with the weeks Mom asks you to help carry up and freeze the extra raw milk she’s bought.
An interesting item appeared on Reuters.com this morning. It gets a little technical in the middle, but the fascinating part is at the end:
Researchers uncover how nanoparticles may damage lungs
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Researchers in China appear to have uncovered how nanoparticles which are used in medicine for diagnosis and delivering drugs may cause lung damage.
Nanotechnology, or the science of the extremely tiny, is an important industry. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.
Apart from medicine, it is used in products like sporting goods, cosmetics, tires and electronics and has a projected annual market of around US$1 trillion by 2015.
However, concerns are growing that it may have toxic effects, particularly to the lungs. But it has never been clear how the damage is caused.
In an article published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, the Chinese experts said a class of nanoparticles used in medicine, ployamidoamine dendrimers (PAMAMs), may cause lung damage by triggering a type of programed cell death known as autophagic cell death.
In experiments, they observed how several types of PAMAMs killed human lung cells but found no evidence that the cells were dying by apoptosis, a natural and common type of cell death.
In a subsequent experiment in mice, they injected an autophagy inhibitor in mice and later exposed the rodents to nanoparticles and found that it “significantly ameliorated the lung damage and improved survival rates.”
“This provides us with a promising lead for developing strategies to prevent lung damage caused by nanoparticles,” said the leader of the team, Chengyu Jiang, a molecular biologist at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing.
Scientists hope nanoparticles will be able to improve the effectiveness of drugs and gene therapy by carrying them to the right place in the body and by targeting specific tissues, regulating the release of drugs and reducing damage to healthy tissues.
(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
Okay, let’s back up just a paragraph or two. See where it says, “developing strategies to prevent lung damage caused by nanoparticles“, then a little later “Scientists hope nanoparticles will be able to…“?
Herein lies my issue with modern science and medicine. Science starts putting things in drugs, cosmetics, tires and socks because they can. Then, when medicine discovers reasons why perhaps they shouldn’t, science steps in again and says, “Wait, we’ll just find a way to fix the damage!” The discussion never seems to come back around to the idea that perhaps this new technology isn’t the best way to meet the need.
But what really boggles my mind is that the original premise is never revisited. Scientists hope nanoparticles will be able to… So, we’re putting these things that we know cause lung damage into foods, cosmetics, medicines and other things that surround not only those who choose to partake but those of us who don’t know any differently, and we don’t even know they will perform?
Please forgive my overly cine-fied brain, but the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park keep ringing in my ears:
“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now…you want to sell it!
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Victus Caveo
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
