Dr. Mercola’s interview with Dr. Bill Osmunson, a dentist who has become an expert on, and advocate against, fluoride.
KARLSRUHE, GERMANY — Wastewater treatment plants are not capable of completely removing artificial sweeteners from wastewater, German researchers recently reported, according to a June 18 ScienceDaily article.
The presence of artificial sweeteners also has been detected in surface waters downstream of the discharge points of the wastewater treatment plants studied. The researchers, scientists Marco Scheurer, Heinz-Jürgen Brauch and Frank Thomas Lange from the Water Technology Center in Karlsruhe, Germany, have indicated this creates the potential they still exist in treated drinking water.
In the study, published online in Springer’s journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, the researchers used a new robust analytical method to detect the artificial sweeteners in processed wastewater from two German sewage treatment plants and a soil aquifer treatment site located in a Mediterranean country.
The method simultaneously extracted and analyzed seven commonly used artificial sweeteners: cyclamate, acesulfame, saccharin, aspartame, neotame, neohesperidin dihydrochalcone and sucralose.
According to ScienceDaily, Scheurer concluded: “Due to the use of artificial sweeteners as food additives, the occurrence of artificial sweetener traces in the aquatic environment might become a primary issue for consumer acceptance.”
LOS ANGELES — Rural residents who drink water from private wells are “much more likely” to have Parkinson’s disease, a finding that bolsters theories that farm pesticides may be partially to blame, according to new research from a University of California at Los Angeles-led team of scientists, an August 5 Environmental Health News (EHN) article said.
Over the past few years, a growing body of evidence has led experts to suspect that agricultural pesticides can attack developing brains, perhaps in the womb or infancy, leading to Parkinson’s disease later in life. Many insecticides widely used on farms are potent neurotoxins, and lab animals exposed to mixes of them develop Parkinson’s symptoms.
Also, several previous studies of farmers and rural residents have reported a link.
The new study of more than 700 people in California’s Central Valley found that those who likely consumed contaminated private well water had a higher rate of Parkinson’s. The risk was around 90 percent higher for those whose drinking water came from private wells near fields sprayed with the widely used insecticides propargite or chlorpyrifos.
People with Parkinson’s “were more likely to have consumed private well water, and had consumed it on average 4.3 years longer” than those who did not have the disease, said the scientists. They were led by UCLA epidemiology professor Beate Ritz, and their study published online last week in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The small cocktail or “baby” carrots you buy are made using the larger crooked or deformed carrots which are put through a machine which cuts and shapes them into cocktail carrots. You might have known that already. But what you might not know is that once the carrots are cut and shaped into cocktail carrots, they are dipped in a solution of water and chlorine in order to preserve them.
When a baby carrot turns white (“white blushing”), this causes the bags of carrots to be pulled from the shelf and thrown away. To prevent this consumer waste, the carrots are dipped in chlorine to prevent the white blushing from happening.
Chlorine is a very well-known carcinogen. Organic growers instead use a citrus based, nontoxic solution called Citrox.
Federal regulations require chlorine treatment of the water supplied to urban/suburban areas of America and much of Canada from surface sources such as lakes, reservoirs and rivers. That constitutes about 75 percent of water that Americans consume. Water from underground sources generally is not chlorinated unless it is supplemented by surface water. My hometown, Lacey, Washington, and some surrounding communities that are supplied water by Lacey, are fortunate to be among that group; I’d like to see that continue.
Chlorination is inferior water treatment on at least two counts. (1) Although it has greatly lowered infectious waterborne diseases in the U.S. and Canada, chlorination fails against a variety of water problems including parasites and can seriously harm people who use the water. (2) Its cost is unnecessarily high. As of 1996, Andover, Massachusetts’ new ozone treatment costs $83 per million gallons of purified water, only two-thirds as much as the old treatment process. The town saves $64,000 annually in chemicals costs alone, [1] and uses less electricity. See later
