I stumbled on this below article.. has anyone seen it before? Has there been anything newer on the subject?
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Stay tuned for some expert advice...Comment
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I am generally VERY skeptical of any medical advice spread in the popular media.
Here's perhaps my all-time favorite load of BS from a popular "expert" who calls herself "The Food Babe". Those of you with some science background should find yourselves rolling on the floor:
Food Babe Travel Essentials – No Reason to Panic on the Plane!
By Food Babe
I’m on the plane to LAX, the first leg en route to our first stop – Tokyo! I can’t think of a better time or place to write this article.
Airplane travel, is unfortunately (and fortunately!) a big part of my way of life. I’d be surprised if you added up the amount of travel I have conducted for work and personal if it didn’t end up being a full year of my life. For this reason, I set out to find out exactly the best strategies to keep your body energized, free of aliments, and flying high when you are on the bird!
A few facts about what airplanes do to your body -
When your body is in the air, at a seriously high altitude, your body under goes some serious pressure. Just think about it – Airplanes thrive in places we don’t. You are traveling in a pressurized cabin, and when your body is pressurized, it gets really compressed!
Compression leads to all sorts of issues. First off your body’s digestive organs start to shrink, taxing your ability to digest large quantities of food. Secondly, this compression reduces the ability for your body to normally circulate blood through your blood vessels. Sitting down for long hours while this is happening, exacerbates these issues, leading to what they call "Economy Class Syndrome." Economy Class Syndrome results the action of sitting in a cramped space for a long period of time, thus resulting in blood flow loss to the legs. A unhealthy person or someone who eats a poor diet, smokes, has heart disease, diabetes or an auto-immune disorder has a larger risk of developing DVT, which basically causes a blood clot in your one of your large veins in your leg and you risk death.
Additionally, the pressurized cabin reduces the humidity by 40% of what humans typically thrive at. The Sahara Desert has more humidity at ~25% than your airplane does at ~10%. Remember your body is made up of 50% water, if the humidity is reduced by 40%, your body becomes very dehydrated, very quickly and usually without you feeling the effects until after you get off the plane. Dehydration causes all sorts of issues from fatigue, headaches, constipation, light headedness and even death in extreme cases.
The air you are breathing on an airplane is recycled from directly outside of your window. That means you are breathing everything that the airplanes gives off and is flying through. The air that is pumped in isn’t pure oxygen either, it’s mixed with nitrogen, sometimes almost at 50%. To pump a greater amount of oxygen in costs money in terms of fuel and the airlines know this! The nitrogen may affect the times and dosages of medications, make you feel bloated and cause your ankles and joints swell.
Did you know certain countries require that airplanes and even passengers be sprayed with pesticide before they take off? This means if you are visiting one of these countries you are breathing in these fumes potentially all flight, especially if they were sprayed on board. Horrific!
Ok enough horror facts about airplane travel (especially while I am flying right now!)…Here’s my Food Babe tips on what you can do to avoid and/or protect yourself of all the facts I mentioned above.
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Is it OK to breath 78% Nitrogen? What if we were to drink some of that Dihydrogen oxide? -
Watch out for they dihydrogen monoxide stuff! http://www.dhmo.org
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In general the popular media are not very good at reporting science. This article is from Reader's Digest, author is Alexa Erickson. There is no info about her and it looks really suspect to me. There are a LOT of people out there writing about health that have no right to be doing so. You will notice that I NEVER wright about it.
She says "According to the World Health Organization, human bodies are capable of properly releasing small amounts of aluminum efficiently, so it’s considered safe to ingest 40mg per kilogram of body weight of aluminum per day. Unfortunately, most people are ingesting far more than this." The link leads to a 544 page WHO document on food additives. The words aluminum or foil do not appear anywhere in the doc. She never says where she got the 40mg figure or the assertion we are ingesting more.
She goes on to say "For example, researchers have found high concentrations of aluminum in the brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s disease." The linked article says NOTHING of the sort. It states clearly that AL is a neurotoxin but there is no proven link to Alz.
Here's a quote from Alzheimers.org's page on myths: "During the 1960s and 1970s, aluminum emerged as a possible suspect in Alzheimer's. This suspicion led to concern about exposure to aluminum through everyday sources such as pots and pans, beverage cans, antacids and antiperspirants. Since then, studies have failed to confirm any role for aluminum in causing Alzheimer's. Experts today focus on other areas of research, and few believe that everyday sources of aluminum pose any threat."
Aluminum is everywhere, it is the third most abundant element on the planet. Studies always rate aluminum intake from cookware far down the list, behind dust, drinking water, antacids, antiperspirants, buffered aspirin, occupational sources, etc. And the healthy human body has the capacity for excreting what very small levels end up in the body.
She also says "Studies have also found that high aluminum intake may be linked to a reduction in the growth rate of human cells," Well that link is to an abstract, not a whole research paper, and it is irrelevant to real world because we are not told how much the brain absorbs under non-petry dish conditions.
She points out that acidic food extracts more aluminum. A well known phenomenon. See my article on the lasagna cell. But there is no correlation to that info with what is absorbed by the body, or the brain, how much is expelled, and how much is dangerous.
I said I never write about health. There is one exception. Please read this http://amazingribs.com/tips_and_tech...nd_health.htmlComment
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Nonsense. We all know this is what you use to make a hat that protects us from all sorts of potential hazards, particularly alien mind control.Comment
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The preponderance of the evidence says there is nothing to fear. Absolutely worth continuing to support studies and investigations, but the effect is likely to be minor given the difficulty reproducing any purported effect. When there is a strong correlation, like with cancer and cigarette smoking or mercury and lead with neurological disease, evidence mounts pretty consistently in a familiar and predictable way. Not true in the case of aluminum.
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Science never said everyone who smokes will get lung cancer/die. Science never said non-smokers will never get lung cancer/die. About 15%-20% of lung cancer deaths/year were non-smokers. Folks that smoke 2 packs/day and drink a fifth of bourbon/day and live to 105 just chose their parents wisely.
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George Burns smoked like a chimney and drank like a reservoir and lived to be 101 years old. Some humans are more susceptible to cancer triggering substances than others. Fortunately I've not had any problems so far. My dad died at 86 and my mom recently died at 90.
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I have some in one of my fillings, that's how I listen and talk to the ailensComment
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I've said this before but I own a steel service center and we cut a lot of aluminum so there's always aluminum dust/particulates around. I've got guys who have been out there 30+ years and no one has ever suffered any ill effects.
Well, there was that one time that a guys wife gave birth to a Cyclops but that's it, no other ill effects. Wait, there was that one other time where a guys "thing" just kind of broke off while he was using a urinal but other than that, nothing.
Just kidding. There's lots of exposure to aluminum out there and we've never had a single issue. I'd say that using aluminum foil on occasion or on a regular basis is perfectly safe.Comment
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Thanks everyone!!!!Comment
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