Free breathing - but not free drinking D-lightful D-clarations, part two In the last Daily Dose, I wrote to you about how a group of female doctors representing the American Medical Women's Association concluded - at a conference sponsored by Big Pharma, no less - that for maximum bone strength and resistance to brittleness and breakage, the best course of action is aggressive supplementation with dietary vitamin D. Not drugs, but the "sun-vitamin" I've been shining a light on for years, and which the VAST MAJORITY of Americans are woefully deficient of. As a little icing on the cake, these lady-MDs also pointed a finger of guilt squarely at that archenemy of all health, sunscreen - also something I've been doing since they came out with the dreadful stuff. But I digress... As if any more evidence were needed to convince you to throw open the windows and bask in sunlight's glow - or get outside for at least 15 minutes a day - no matter what your latitude on the map, consider this: New evidence shows that vitamin D could help treat steroid-resistant asthma. According to some recent research conducted by scientists at King's College London, both tests on human cells and trials on a small group of asthmatic patients reveal that vitamin D supplementation may help make even patients that don't respond well to inhaled steroids (the typical asthma treatment) more responsive to their therapy. The study's authors theorize that the vitamin may boost asthma patients' production of a chemical called IL-10, which modulates the immuno-response of T-cells - a key factor in asthma management. According to the WebMD article I discovered this study in, the scientists also hypothesize that vitamin D may play a role in helping to control other diseases of the immune system or involving inflammation But enough of the medical gobbledygook. What this means is if you have asthma, and your mainstream-prescribed steroids aren't helping (or aren't helping as much as they used to), you've nothing to lose - and perhaps a lot to gain - by aggressively supplementing with vitamin D. Or you could eat plenty of D-rich foods, like meats, eggs, and milk (only if you can find a source of raw milk). And speaking of vitamin-rich raw milk and its sources... **************************************************** Big Brother comes to the Animal Farm I've written before about raw milk - and about how it's illegal to retail in most states (Daily Dose, 12/9/03). Of course, good ol' American ingenuity triumphed over these laws in some states - farmers started selling "shares" in a cow, which people then bought, and the milk became the dividend. But leave it to the Orwellian federal government to put the kibosh on what's truly healthy (they do it almost universally). According to a recent USA Today article, the Food and Drug Administration is claiming that raw milk is dangerous - and like the meek little lemmings they are, it appears that the various state governments in those places that allow these "shareholder" dairies are lowering the boom on the practice. In Washington state, the focus of the USA Today piece, the state's Department of Agriculture is demanding that such dairies be specially regulated - complete with a special license, monthly inspections, tests, warning labels and all the other red tape and senseless interference that accompany almost any government invasion into the private sector. All of this absolutely floors me - because it wasn't all that long ago when the ONLY milk we had to drink was raw milk! We've done it for untold millennia, and I don't recall the history books making reference to vast milk-borne epidemics. Do you? In my opinion, the only things that make milk dangerous nowadays are all the additives and preservatives we're putting in the stuff - plus all the antibiotics and hormones we're pumping into the cattle we're milking it from. And of course, heat pasteurization. To date, I've never heard of anyone dying (or even being sickened) from drinking healthy, nourishing raw milk. But I do know of statistics that show more than 300,000 Americans are killed every year by prescription drugs. Maybe the FDA and their state puppets could start regulating THAT side of things a little better. Just a thought. Thinking about the law - and drinking raw, William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
