McDonald's Report Card

One of my favorite organizations that fights against fast food marketing to kids is looking for financial support. They sent the letter below...

Are you distressed when Batman, McDonalds, and Lego partner to sell kids on fast food and video games? When Nickelodeon features the Bratz in a made-for-TV movie? When Elmo and Barbie morph into a "Barbie loves Elmo" toy?

Are you appalled when marketers spend billions of dollars advertising toxic brands and products directly to children - and then lay all of the blame on parents for the rise of marketing-related problems like childhood obesity, youth violence, and precocious, irresponsible sexuality?

Why not do something about it? Support the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the only national organization devoted solely to countering the harmful effects of commercialization on children. With your help, we're making a difference. We rely on you because we will not compromise our commitment to children and families by accepting corporate funding.

We act on your marketing concerns. When a Boston father contacted us because Webkinz World, the leading social network site for young children, was accepting outside ads, we alerted the media and launched a letter-writing campaign. As a result, Webkinz now gives parents the option for kids to use an ad-free version of their site.

When a mom in Seminole County, Florida, alerted us to McDonald's report card advertising at her daughter's school, we made the ads a national embarrassment for the fast food giant. Our campaign for commercial-free report cards was featured on Good Morning America, The Colbert Report, and hundreds of newspapers around the country. As a result, McDonald's agreed to end the program.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

People Who Are Destroying America - Happy Meal

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

We're reclaiming schools from corporate marketers. Schools around the country are are promoting reading and not consumerism with CCFC's Guide to Commercial-Free Book Fairs. With our help, legislators and educators have made South Carolina the first state to ban all marketing on school buses. Working with local activists and parents, we've successfully stopped BusRadio - a company that plans on "taking student targeted marketing to the next level" - in school districts from Connecticut to California.


We're countering the sexualization of children. After more than 5,000 emails from CCFC members, Scholastic, Inc. decided not to bring the highly sexualized Bratz brand back to school this year. When we caught BusRadio advertising 90210 - a television show chock full of teen sex and drinking - on its website for children as young as six, they began pulling the ads within hours. Our campaign to stop Children's Hospital in Columbus from selling naming rights to the infamous Abercrombie & Fitch for $10 million launched a national conversation about the ethics of public health institutions partnering with corporations that undermine children's wellbeing.


Help us stop the commercialization of childhood, advocate for policies that protect children from unscrupulous marketers, and take on the worst corporate offenders. Your tax-deductible contribution will allow us to continue to build a coalition of organizations and individuals who value children more than the bottom line.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, every contribution of $125 or more will be doubled from now until January 1st. Any amount you are able to give would be greatly appreciated. Please visit http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/donate/ to support CCFC today.


Susan Linn, EdD Alvin F. Poussaint, MD
Director, CCFC CCFC Steering Committee

Deodorant Kills 12 Year Old Boy

A boy of 12 collapsed and died after using 'copious' amounts of deodorant in a cramped bathroom, an inquest heard. Daniel Hurley was overcome by solvents in the Lynx Vice spray and his heart began to beat irregularly, the hearing was told.

His father Robert found him collapsed in the bath at the family home after spraying on too much of the deodorant. Mr Hurley said he had desperately tried to revive Daniel but the schoolboy died in hospital five days later from cardiac arrhythmia - or abnormal heart rhythms. He told the inquest in Derby on Wednesday that Daniel 'was always putting gel on his hair and spraying deodorant'.

Mr Hurley told the inquest he had been making tea while his son used the bathroom at their home in Sandiacre, near Nottingham. 'The bathroom is adjacent to the kitchen and I shouted to see if he was OK,' he said. 'I heard nothing so I shouted again but did not get a reply. 'I forced the door open and found Daniel in the bath. I checked for his heart rate and his breath but he was not breathing.'

An ambulance took Daniel to Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre. He died five days later on January 12 this year.

Consultant pathologist Dr Andrew Hitchcock, who carried out a postmortem examination on Daniel, said he found no evidence of substance abuse. There was also no evidence of any life-threatening disease, alcohol or drugs in Daniel's body.

Full Story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087772/Boy-12-collapsed-died-using-Lynx-deodorant.html

My Comment:

Hopefully this tragic incident will bring to light that our "personal care products" should be called our "weapons of individual destruction" or WIDs. While most people will not succumb to instant death from putting on their deodorant, everyone will have some type of detrimental consequences.

From shampoo to soap, from deodorant to hair care products, from toothpaste to moisturizing lotion (and suntan lotion), everything we slather ourselves in on a daily basis adds to a toxic load our body has to deal with. Our skin is our largest organ, so when we apply this chemical concoctions on the surface of our body, we are really "ingesting" these chemicals.

Think about the drug company's products: nicotine patch, birth control patch, ADHD patch, lidocane patch, progesterone cream, and many, many more. There are many transdermal pharmaceutical products on the market using a variety of packaging; patches, creams and gels. These products rely on the fact that the skin makes an excellent delivery vehicle for chemicals to easily get into the body. This is exactly what is happening every day when we go through our morning rituals.

For more information on personal care products, please visit the following two websites maintained by two personal friends of mine that are truly passionate about this topic:

Heather Carmona's Pure Alternatives:
http://www.PureAlternatives.net/

Jane Griffith's Skin Essentials:
http://www.SkinEssentials.us/

8 Signs That a Child May Be Autistic

(HealthDay News) -- Autism is a childhood developmental disorder that has no cure. Autistic children have problems with social interaction, communication, and may engage in repetitive behaviors.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke lists these common symptoms of autism:

1. Seeming withdrawn, unresponsive or indifferent to others in social settings.
2. Not responding when the person's name is called.
3. Not making eye contact with other people.
4. Difficulty communicating with others.
5. Repetitive movements or behaviors, such as rocking, twirling or self-abuse.
6. Disinterest in or aversion to physical affection.
7. Delayed speech and verbal development.
8. Not knowing how to play with other children.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20081122/hl_hsn/healthtipsignsthatachildmaybeautistic

My Comment:

What do you think about the statement "Autism has no cure"?

Visit my blog to take my poll:
Can Autism Be Cured Through Diet?

Google Tracks Flu by Spying on You

I saw this on the Drudge Report:

SICK SURVEILLANCE:
GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ET

GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."

Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity."

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning." Developing...

My Comment:
Scary stuff! I hope they don't use this for making flu vaccines mandatory. Worse yet, I hope they don't report on search terms like "how to avoid vaccines", "vaccines and autism", "chicken pox party" or any other vaccine related term. Fast forward 10 years... will the government swoop down on a city and jab every kid in the neighborhood if there are too many vaccine related searches?!?!?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Maybe this will allow Microsoft or some other company to promote their search engine - and highlight the fact that your data will not be sent to Big Brother.

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.

That's the view of scientists at Imperial College London who published a paper in Nature Biotechnology Oct. 6 describing how these microbes interact with the body. Understanding the workings of the superorganism, they say, is crucial to the development of personalized medicine and health care in the future because individuals can have very different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial fauna.

The scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Luckily for us, the bacteria are on the whole commensal, sharing our food but doing no real harm. (The word derives from the Latin meaning to share a table for dinner.) In fact, they are often beneficial: Our commensal bacteria protect us from potentially dangerous infections. They do this through close interaction with our immune systems.

read more digg story

My Comment:

I think the concept of the human body being outnumbered by bacteria is an important one to be aware of. There are more that 100 trillion bacterial cells in our body - most of them are in our gut. The bacteria outnumbers human / somatic cells by a factor of about 10 to 1. These bacteria and our overall gut health provide us with about 80% of our immunity. Something to think about when you eat a lot sugar (food for the bad bacteria in the gut) or take antibiotics (kills good and bad bacteria). Take care of your friendly flora in your gut, and they will take care of you.