by Andreas Moritz

(NaturalNews) If you are among those calorie-conscious consumers who opt for diet sodas or other diet products, you may actually ruin your health and become fat, according to several new studies.

A Purdue University study published 10 February 2008 in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience reported that rats on diets containing the artificial sweetener saccharin gained more weight than rats given sugary food, casting doubt on the benefits of low-calorie sweeteners.

During an interview, ABC News’ medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard stated that “there is something about diet foods that changes your metabolic limit, your brain chemistry.” Savard said another recent study, which included more than 18,000 people, found healthy adults who consumed one diet drink a day could increase their risk of health problems and metabolic disorders by a whooping 30 to 40 percent.

The Purdue study showed there is a direct connection between the taste of food and calorie consumption. The rats whose diets contained artificial sweeteners appeared to overeat and become fat more quickly.

“The taste buds taste sweet, but there’s no calorie load that comes with it. There’s a mismatch here. It seems it changes your brain chemistry in some way,” Savard said. “Anything you put in your mouth, your body has a strong reaction to it. It’s much more than counting calories. It seems normally with sweet foods that we rev up our metabolism.”

Today 59 percent of Americans consume diet soft drinks, making them the second-most-popular low-calorie, sugar-free products in the nation, according to a consumer survey from the Calorie Control Council, a nonprofit association that represents the low-calorie and reduced-fat food and beverage industry. If you add to that all the thousands of available diet foods that also contain artificial sweeteners, it is no surprise that over 60 percent of the American population suffer from metabolic disorders and are overweight or obese. Weight gain increases the risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

The following excerpt is taken from the author’s book: “Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation”:

Why Sweeteners Make You Fat

A major American controlled study on 80,000 women showed that those who regularly use artificial sweeteners put on more weight per year than those who do not use them. What is even more surprising is the finding that, with the widespread use of sweeteners, the consumption of ordinary sugar and sugary foods has increased, too. In other words, the more artificial sweeteners you consume, the more food urges you have, thereby fulfilling their patent as an “appetite enhancement”.

There is overwhelming proof that these food poisons are making us fat. Research conducted at Purdue University shows that a group of test subjects fed artificial sweeteners subsequently consumed three times the calories of those given regular sugar. According to the study, it is far less fattening to eat sugar than artificial sweeteners, although eating this much regular sugar isn’t good for anyone either.

Most mainstream doctors recommend that their overweight patients consume diet soda, Sweet-N-Low, etc. for weight loss, but in actual fact their advice causes the patients to crave calories and binge on unhealthy carbohydrates. The obesity epidemic is spreading like wildfire ever since diet foods and beverages gained popularity. The following explanation resolves this mystery.

The body has a self-regulating mechanism, a kind of thermostat that measures the amount of energy (or calories) it can obtain from a particular meal. When your body has received enough energy from the food you have eaten, then your mouth, stomach, intestines, and liver send messages to the brain that all energy requirements have been met. Subsequently, your nervous system secretes hormones that stop your desire for more food. This point of saturation is essential for your wellbeing, for without it you would continuously want to eat and never feel satisfied. If, for instance, during one particular meal, you eat foods that contain only very little energy or at least not enough to fulfill your energy requirements, then your body will tempt you to eat more during the next meal. This way, the body makes up for the loss of energy during the previous meal. The same happens when your digestive ability is low and you are not deriving sufficient energy from the food you eat.

On the other hand, when you eat food during one meal that has a higher content of calories than your body really requires at this moment, it will signal for less energy during the next meal. Your body will strive to keep your individual “set point” or energy distribution point as balanced and normal as possible. Whenever you deprive yourself of eating enough and are unable to meet the energy needs of your body, you will look for more food the next day, the day after, and so on. This leads to chronic overeating which packs plenty of low-energy food into your intestinal tract. Since your body is incapable of digesting and absorbing low-energy food properly, it turns this food into fat and waste, and clogs up your lymphatic, digestive, and circulatory systems.

This is the time when your body signals “famine.” You start craving foods, particularly refined carbohydrates such as ordinary sugar, chocolate, sweet beverages, coffee, etc., which all give you an instant boost of energy. But they also contain only “empty” energy and just raise the sugar level in your blood for a short time. After a while the sugar levels drops below normal, which may cause depression, moodiness and exhaustion.

If you are overweight and believe that you can reduce weight by restricting your daily intake of calories, you will be very disappointed. Within a few days, your body will run out of energy and want to eat, hence the increased appetite or craving. If you still don’t eat enough, you will fall into a depression, which may cause you to binge on food ravenously. Your body thinks that periodic famines are going on and tries to convert some of the food into fat deposits to prepare for the next one. After each “voluntary famine” or “weight reducing” diet, your body will put on weight much faster than it did before. This is known as the yo-yo effect.

Under normal circumstances, the body converts calories into heat, which then simply evaporates. Well-circulated brown fat tissue, which is located near the large arteries and in the underarms, is the main source of this energy. New research suggests that in some obese people this mechanism may be disturbed and that the best dietary rules would be of no avail. Abusing the body’s digestive system through frequent strict dieting may be the main cause of this problem.

Because artificial sweeteners are low-energy foods and non-physiological, the body deals with them in the same way as described above. It recognizes their complete absence of potential energy and signals “low energy.” As a result, it stimulates the desire for more food. This principle is a well-known and commonly applied practice, both in the food industry and in animal feeding. Animal feeds contain highly concentrated saccharin to stimulate the animal’s appetite so that they eat more frequently and grow fat faster. The same mechanism applies to the human body, including children.

Children eating diet foods in lieu of the full-calorie versions may lead to overeating and obesity when they grow up, according to a 2007 report from the University of Alberta, Canada. Lead researcher Professor David Pierce stated, “Based on what we’ve learned, it is better for children to eat healthy, well-balanced diets with sufficient calories for their daily activities rather than low-calorie snacks or meals.”

Deceiving the Body

For both humans and animals, aspartame, sucralose, saccharin and other sweeteners belong to the category of “sweet” food. The sweetness of natural foods is caused by sugar. Because sugar can move straight through the stomach walls, it will appear in the bloodstream within 3-5 minutes. However, the body has to keep the blood sugar level in check since too little or too much sugar can be dangerous. The body regulates sugar levels automatically through simple reflex mechanisms. When sugar touches the taste buds for the sweet taste on the tongue, the pancreas is given the instruction to secrete insulin, which is required to make it (the sugar) available to the cells.

If you eat artificial sweeteners, the body naturally responds to their sweet taste by secreting insulin. Rather than receiving sugar in the blood as expected, however, it receives a combination of protein compounds. Doing its normal job, the pancreas has already prepared a portion of insulin that now floats about in the bloodstream searching for the expected sugar. Since it isn’t found there, the insulin removes some of the blood sugar instead. This effectively lowers your sugar levels. However, since this situation can be life-endangering, your body quickly signals “hunger” which becomes a sudden, strong “craving.” Since foods with artificial sweeteners are not able to meet the demand for an increase in blood sugar, you begin to look for sugary foods.

Instead of saving the calories that are contained in ordinary sugar, you have artificially increased your need and appetite for more sweet food. If you try to satisfy this desire by eating more foods containing artificial sweeteners (without calories), the urge to eat will become even stronger than before and you will start overeating. Researchers have found that the urge to eat more food after ingesting artificial sweeteners in a drink can last up to 90 minutes, even when all blood tests show normal values.

A more serious situation arises when the body is given artificial sweeteners on an ongoing basis. Since the sweeteners repeatedly stimulate the taste buds responsible for detecting sugar, the brain maintains an almost continuous urge to eat. At the same time, the liver is instructed by the brain to store sugar supplies rather than to release them, which causes chronic fatigue. The pancreas, which had wrongly assumed that real sugar was entering the bloodstream, eventually realizes that it has been cheated. Hence it reduces its secretion of insulin. One might think that this solves the problem but the body reacts with depression.

Sweeteners Cause Obesity, Depression, Brain Damage

Sugar is known to “improve” moods for relatively short periods of time. With the help of insulin, sugar increases the secretion of Serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter of happiness. If insulin secretion fails to occur, happiness remains low. The only way to get out of this situation, it seems, is to eat sugar so that the body can secrete insulin again.

You may believe that the fewer calories you eat, the more weight you will lose. But food manufactures know that the more artificially sweetened foods and beverages you consume, the more you will want their normal sugar-containing foods and beverages as well. Diet foods and diet beverages have not only contributed to a massive increase in sugar consumption and obesity but also led to an epidemic of depression. I have seen numerous depressed people over the years, a large percentage of whom regularly used artificial sweeteners. By cutting out diet foods and “light” products, they have returned to their normal moods, and they have lost excess weight, too.

Apart from causing obesity and depression, sweeteners have been linked to insomnia, headaches, giddiness, loss of memory, nausea, pre-menstrual syndrome, panic attacks, epileptic fits, and even overstimulation of breast glands leading to breast cancer. Aspartame in particular may cause extensive damage to the central nervous system. Once it has entered the intestinal tract, aspartame is converted into two highly excitatory neurotransmitter amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine, as well as into methyl alcohol (wood-grain alcohol) and formaldehyde (embalming fluid).

Wood alcohol is one of the most dangerous substances that result from eating artificial sweeteners. It may directly enter the bloodstream and move through the brain barrier into the central nervous system where it can influence the neurotransmitters, alter brain function, and cause brain damage. Wood alcohol can cause blindness and formaldehyde can cause cancer. In some cases aspartame may suppress appetite and “kill” AGNI, the digestive fire, altogether. Both can lead to quick, excessive weight gain. According to Consumer Reports, aspartame has a shelf life of between two and three months. After that it begins to break down and pose an increasing danger to the consumer. The same occurs when aspartame or an aspartame-containing food is heated.

Aspartame accounts for more than 75 percent of the total adverse reactions to food reported to the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. Hundreds of airline pilots have reported symptoms of memory loss and confusion, headaches, seizures, visual disturbances and gastrointestinal reactions as a result of consuming sweeteners. If pregnant women consume large quantities of diet sodas to avoid weight gain, their placenta may accumulate methyl alcohol, causing mental retardation in the fetus. They also risk maternal malnutrition because of the gastrointestinal problems and diarrhea associated with sweeteners.

Other sweeteners besides aspartame have similar effects. Added to soft drinks, they are now even linked with testicular damage and other key areas of the body. Stimulating the brain of a child with these “pleasure-enhancing” chemicals in beverages will, in some cases, program their senses to look for and use stronger addictive substances such as hard drugs or large amounts of alcohol later in life. The latest sweetener, acesulfame K, may also be carcinogenic, i.e., cause cancer, according to a report published in the British Medical Journal in 1996. To avoid serious health problems, it is best to stick to foods and beverages that come from purely natural sources.

A sugar called tagatose is one of the next sweeteners that will be appearing on products labeled under the pseudo-hygienic appellations of “Light”, “Lite”, “Low Calorie”, “Sugar Free”, “Sugarless”, “Low Fat”, or “Low Sodium,” etc. Hyperuricemia is an unhealthy and unacceptable result from ingesting tagatose. Some researchers believe hyperuricemia is a risk factor for ischemic heart disease, and it has been associated with lipid abnormalities, hypertension, stroke, and preeclampsia. It is an especially hazardous effect with regards to diabetes because hyperuricemia is damaging to the pancreas as well as possibly causing major harm to other organs and systems in the body. Having too much uric acid in the blood predisposes you to developing gout, a painful joint condition.

If you wish to protect yourself and your family from the dreadful consequences of universal deceit and actually benefit from the foods you eat, start with fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes. And be sure to prepare your foods from scratch.

About the author

Andreas Moritz is a medical intuitive; a practitioner of Ayurveda, iridology, shiatsu, and vibrational medicine; a writer; and an artist.

Nothing could be better for the country than cancelling the 2008 election. Leave the office of the presidency empty.

I can see only one possible justification for having a president of the United States: to preside over the dismantling of the federal government. If you think this is a radical idea, think again. This is, in part, what people have long voted for, even if they never actually get it. I can hardly remember a time when a president has been elected who didn’t promise to get the government off our backs.

In one way, this agenda makes no sense, of course. You don’t hire a CEO to drive a company into bankruptcy. You don’t appoint a pastor to shrink a congregation. Why should we expect a president to dismantle the thing that gives him power and fame, and his allies huge wealth? Well, realistically, you can’t. But it’s the best hope we have within the framework of conventional politics.

The irony is that most presidents get elected on the prospect that they will curb power. It’s true of George Bush, who promised domestic cuts and a humble foreign policy. Clinton was also elected on the promise of middle-class tax cuts. We can go back and back and see it was true for the first Bush, for Reagan, for Carter, for Nixon, and so on.

For that matter, FDR himself denounced government spending during this first campaign. “I accuse the present administration [Hoover's] of being the greatest spending administration in peace times in all our history,” and added, “On my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.” He further denounced the government for “fostering regimentation without stint or limit.”

It was even true with George Washington, who had made innumerable speeches on the evil of tyranny only to take power and use it to the benefit of the powerful. Even Jefferson succumbed with his mistaken Louisiana Purchase, though he later entertained the possibility of a salutary breakup of the United States into many different countries.

And so on it goes. And it will happen again, despite all promises.

Folks, there is something wrong with this model of governance, not just current policy but the whole structure. We might even argue that the error goes back to the Constitution, a document that created new government powers unprecedented in Colonial history, and put the government in charge of restraining itself. It set up competitive divisions within government under the presumption that they would keep each other in check. Instead, they cooperated toward mutual expansion, especially after the federal power seizure called the Civil War.

Part of the problem dates to a core error within liberal theory: the belief that it was possible to create a government that was an extension of society, thanks to the relentless input of the people via democratic institutions. What this model did instead is enlist the public as part of their own destruction. And it created confusion about who precisely is to blame when things don’t work out. Under democracy, aren’t we the government? Aren’t we doing this to ourselves?

Let’s draw on another aspect of old-time liberal theory as a means of finding a way out of this mess. There are two additional contributions that liberalism made. It taught that society is capable of self-management, and that government is not the reason for order in society. Summing up the old liberal position, Thomas Paine said:

A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It had its origin in the principles of society, and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has in man and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their laws; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything that is ascribed to government.

If we would be true to this line of thought, we should propose the unthinkable: cancel the election. This has never before been so urgent. Neither party will cut government in a way that is desperately needed. Instead, they offer a left- or right-tinged Americanized socialism or fascism. One promises domestic expansion and foreign reduction; the other promises foreign expansion and domestic reduction. The inevitable compromise: expand both domestically and internationally.

In addition, whatever the new president does will make our growing economic problems worse. The economic interventions they propose will add to our troubles, whether that means expanding inflation, taxes, controls, or debt. Another war is unthinkable, but probably inevitable. You can already detect it in the aggressive trajectory towards Iran. More business regulation can only dampen the fires of free enterprise, which are our saving grace today.

The best solution would be a government that would destroy itself. The second best solution would be a government that does nothing at all – then, at least, matters will not get worse. This is what canceling the election would do. It would introduce enough confusion and chaos to keep government from acting either domestically or internationally, which would be a wonderful thing.

There is also the matter of public will. We pretend as if the person who is elected enjoys the support of a majority. Nonsense. Most people who can vote do not vote, and who can blame them? Those who do vote are most likely voting against the other guy and not for a positive program. The person elected will enjoy a mandate of perhaps 5–10% of the population that actively supports the agenda. I say: make the new president their president but not our president.

It’s true that what I’m proposing constitutes a purely negative agenda. So let’s look to a positive goal. This country is too large to be governed from the center. It is long past time that it be broken into ever smaller pieces, even to the size of the world’s smallest nations. In that way, the US government will cease to be a menace to its citizens and to the world. Prosperity will be assured in the same way it always has: through peace and free trade with all.

But what about the Constitution? Let Jefferson speak: “We have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture to make them unchangeable…. But can they be made unchangeable?… I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to person, not to things.”

It is highly significant that Jefferson, when he wrote his own epitaph, wanted to be remembered for the Declaration of Independence, for the Virginia statute on religious freedom, and for founding the University of Virginia. That he was a two-term president is not listed.

Llewlleyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president and founder of the Mises Institute and editor of LewRockwell.com

Conventional medicine is very good at stealing power from patients. Doctors, drug companies and federal health authorities consistently tell patients they have no power over their health: Disease is a matter of luck, they say. Your genes are to blame. There’s no such thing as healing foods, herbs or nutrients. Only drugs can help you now.

It’s all nonsense, of course, and it’s part of the “power theft” perpetrated every day by promoters of conventional medicine.Take that power back from those who have stolen it.  “Take Back Your Health Power!” Take control of your health from this day forward, putting your health results firmly in your own hands rather than those of doctors, drug company executives or FDA bureaucrats.

I believe you can live a live free of degenerative disease, free of chronic pain, free of prescription drugs, with outstanding mental function, emotional health, physical stamina and optimism. But let’s face it: Conventional medicine isn’t going to help you get there. They don’t want you to be healthy as much as they want you to be a lifelong customer of their overpriced drugs and medical procedures, and that means keeping you ignorant of those things that can truly revolutionize your health.

• pharmaceutical companies and disease mongers trap you into believing you’re diseased when you aren’t.
• recognize marketing claims intended to steal your power.
• take steps to improving your diet over time in a way that never requires strict discipline.
• shop for foods that increase health and vitality.

you shouldn’t believe your health destiny is controlled by your genes.

• permanently change your health outcome to live longer, healthier and happier.
• stop blaming food companies for your health problems and start making immediate changes that work.

conventional medicine wants consumers to stay ignorant about health and wellness

• take steps to prevent chronic disease.
• master your health outcome with proven strategies that really work.
• your doctor is probably a poor source for health information.
• make taking care of your health feel instantly rewarding rather than difficult.
• avoid foods that cause your body to deteriorate over time.

Achieving outstanding health isn’t just about nutrition and exercise, it’s also about overcoming the brainwashing and propaganda of conventional medicine. If you don’t believe you have any power over your health, you’ll never get healthy. Free yourself from the mental prison and false beliefs pounded into your head by conventional medicine. When you free your own mind, you unlock powerful new possibilities for health enhancement that never seemed possible before.