The first thought that springs to mind is that Mohammed is a rather significant name in Islamic culture and every other Muslim male seems to have at as one of his given names – so the seeming dominance of Islamic naming may be illusory. The top ten boys’ names are:
1 Muhammad
2 Oliver
3 Jack
4 Noah
5 Jacob
6 Charlie
7 Harry
8 Joshua
9 James
10 Ethan

There are no other exclusively Islamic names in the list.

The top ten girls’ names are:

1 Sophia
2 Emily
3 Lily
4 Olivia
5 Amelia
6 Isla
7 Isabella
8 Ava
9 Sophie
10 Chloe

No exclusively Islamic names at all.

Another point to bear in mind is that actual numbers are not given in the Metro and many other stories on the matter, so I decided to try to find them. A couple of minutes on Google found this Office for National Statistics page which contains links to a number of Excel sheets, including one for boys’ names, which gives Oliver as the top name. However, there are various spellings of Mohammed which are just different Latin transliterations of the same Arabic name so it may be fair to say that it is the most popular with 7,445 boys given the name.

However, it is clear that there are there are tens of thousands of boys with non-Islamic names, clearly in the vast majority. This may seem like meaningless pedantry but immigration and immigrants are constantly being attacked by those in power, the press really need to report things as they are, not feed into unthinking fears.

Gas Usage Statement

I had a new boiler installed in April last year as the previous one was pretty much kaput. I had one of the allegedly energy efficient condenser boilers installed as per current requirements. As you can see, my energy usage in the subsequent twelve months was down by a magnificent 6.676%. Not quite the huge savings I had been led to expect but better than a poke in the eye I suppose.

But then I got to thinking: the post Christmas period this year was a lot milder than last year so the heating was on a lot less anyway. How much of the saving was due to that rather than the much hyped efficiency of the new boiler. I suppose I’ll find out the next cold winter we have.

His stated results are as follows:

The results of the six sodium fluoride samples are shown here in parts per billion (ppb)

MAX aluminum: 283,218 ppb
MAX arsenic: 137 ppb
MAX strontium: 9417 ppb
MAX lead: 988 ppb
MAX uranium: 1415 ppb
MAX tungsten: presence confirmed in 2 of 6 samples but quantitative analysis not conducted on tungsten

AVG aluminum: 69364 ppb
AVG arsenic: 70 ppb
AVG strontium: 1751 ppb
AVG lead: 299 ppb
AVG uranium: 239 ppb

Wow!! Look at the size of that aluminium contamination! 283,218 parts per … billion …

Another way of expressing that figure would be < 0.03%. Doesn't look quite so scary that way. Can I just say how impressed with Mike Adams' ability to measure small quantities of contaminants to six significant figures?

The question that springs to my mind is how much aluminium does this add to the water supply?

According to this the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allow a maximum fluoride concentration in drinking water of 4 milligrams per litre (4 ppm), so if the most heavily aluminium contaminated fluoride were used it would raise the aluminium levels of water by a little over one part per billion, or one microgramme per litre. Both the UK and US allow a maximum aluminium concentration of 200 microgrammes per litre. Now we could have a discussion about how safe that level is. All I will say is that if you are worried about the aluminium levels of water, targetting fluoridation is not your best strategy.

How much contaminant would you consume if you regularly consumed fluoridated water, using Adams’ figures? Assuming two litres of tap water which contain the average amount of contaminant per day, you would ingest 0.56 microgrammes (560 ng) of aluminium, 0.56 ng of arsenic, 14 ng of strontium, 2.4 ng of lead and 1.9 ng of uranium.

Let us consider another source of trace elements. Natural News writers are rather keen on unrefined sea salt even going so far as to say that it is healthy because it is unrefined and you don’t need to restrict your sodium intake if this is your source. No evidence for this of course but let us take it at face value and see where that gets us.

Sea water is from 0.013 to 5 ppb aluminium or 13 nanogrammes to 5 microgrammes per litre. A litre of sea water (on average) contains 35 grammes of dissolved salts, or 35,000,000 ppb.

NHS guidance is that adults should not consume more than 6 g of salt per day. If this is in the form of sea salt this means anything from 2 to 860 ng of aluminium would be ingested.

Sea water also contains 2 – 4 ppb arsenic, 8,000 ppb strontium, 0.002 – 0.03 ppb lead and 2.8 – 3.1 ppb uranium.

This means your 6 g of sea salt contains 340 – 680 ng of arsenic, 1.4 milligrammes of strontium, 0.34 – 5.1 ng of lead and 480 – 530 ng of uranium. If we are to be cocerned about the level of these elements found in fluoridated water then there are dangerous amounts of arsenic, strontium and uranium in sea salt together with potentially dangerous (depending on source) amounts of aluminium and lead. I look forward to Mike Adams demanding that this dangerous substance be banned.

The headlinne could not be clearer:

From the psychiatrist who’d never take anti-depressants, to the heart doctor who steers clear of statins, we reveal the medical treatments the experts REFUSE to have themselves

Read the examples writer Chloe Lambert gives, however, and the fabric of her story starts to fray a little.

Let’s start with that psychiatrist, since Ms Lambert does:

Dr Joanna Moncrieff, senior lecturer in psychiatry at University College London and author of The Myth Of The Chemical Cure.
I’ve been practising psychiatry for 20 years, and in my experience antidepressants don’t do any good at all. I wouldn’t take them under any circumstances – not even if I were suicidal.
All the research shows is that, at best, antidepressants make people feel a tiny bit better than a placebo. But this doesn’t mean they actually treat depression…

…I believe depression is an extreme reaction to our circumstances, and the best way to recover from it is to work out the cause.

I have no doubt that some, perhaps the majority, of depression cases are due to external causes – bereavement, relationship problems, shitty job etc – but there is no evidence that all are. I am afraid Dr Moncrieff is arguing from authority rather than evidence here. Furthermore, she contradicts herself; “antidepressants don’t do any good at all” is followed by “antidepressants make people feel a tiny bit better than a placebo”.

To me, that second quote suggests that ADs are working for some people but are plainly not a cure-all. Still this narrative is reasonably convincing and at this point you’d be forgiven for thinking the story backs the headline. But you really should read further – and not just the sub-headings because they’re misleading too because next, we have “Weight-loss GP who wouldn’t go on a diet”:

All the evidence is that diets rarely work long term.
I’ve been working with people to help them lose weight for decades and my experience has shown me that the only way to achieve long-term success is through asking: ‘Why?’ – why do we comfort eat, why do we prefer fatty foods, why do we drink too much alcohol and why do we find physical activity unattractive?
Techniques based on changing behaviour (similar to cognitive behavioural therapy), combined with strategies such as keeping a food diary and setting realistic goals, are what really help people lose weight effectively.
Diets which encourage polarised approaches, such as low-carb, 5:2 diets or any other ‘reductionist’ approaches, will only ever achieve short-term success – you’ll regain the weight you lost.

My reading of this is that trendy diets (usually gushingly reported by the press, I might add) are not much use but finding the root causes of over-eating will result in reduced food intake and – er – weight loss. So it isn’t actually true that said GP would refuse to diet.

Then we have “Heart doctor who refuses to have statins”:

Statins have had a huge effect in reducing the number of strokes and heart attacks and there’s now a movement to give these cholesterol-lowering tablets to everyone.
But I wouldn’t take one unless I had proof I was at significant risk.
Whenever you’re taking a drug, you’ve got to think about the risks and the benefits.
Statins reduce your chance of heart attack or stroke by about 30 per cent, so, yes, there’s a benefit. But in real terms it’s very small.
As a 60-year-old, healthy, non-smoking man, statistically my annual risk of a stroke or heart attack is about 1 per cent – very low. Taking a statin would take it down to 0.7 per cent – still very low. And I’ve spent my professional life prescribing statins, so I know about the side-effects: muscle aches, general debility and stomach upsets.
Some say statins should be given when the risk is 1.5 per cent, but I personally wouldn’t consider taking the drug unless my risk was 3 per cent.
Anyone who’s had a stroke or heart attack has a risk of about 3 per cent and for them the pain is definitely worth the gain.

Now it becomes clear how misleading the headline and sub-headlines are. Professor Channer is quite clear on the benefits of statins and is currently “refusing” them because he doesn’t actually need them.

“Former GP who says vitamin C is pointless”:

Despite what many patients say, vitamin C probably doesn’t cut short colds. It probably won’t do you any harm and it won’t break the bank, but on the whole the evidence is pretty limited.

This is hardly going against received wisdom. It’s only health woosters who bang on about the virtues of vitamin C supplementation, not conventional doctors.

“Health Professor who says exercising isn’t enough”:

Indeed he does. He says that exercise has many benefits but needs to be combined with reduced food intake if you want to lose much weight.

“Orthopaedic surgeon who’d avoid X-rays”:

This would appear to be implying that he considers x-rays themselves to be dangerous. Not the reality:

Too often, patients see their doctor about stiffness, aches and pains, wanting something to be done. The doctor sends them for an X-ray, which may or may not show a bit of wear and tear, and tells them they have arthritis.
As soon as they get that diagnosis, people tend to lose control and become victims. They take anti-inflammatories (which can have gastrointestinal side-effects), feel frightened to exercise and generally become miserable.
That’s why, as long as I didn’t have red-flag symptoms of severe arthritis – such as constant pain, or pain that comes on at night – I would avoid an X-ray.

The argument here is surely that doctors and surgeons should explain the benefits of exercise to people with joints problems, not avoid x-raying them.

There are more examples but the rest, as far as I can see, are not cases of experts refusing treatments normally prescribed, quite the opposite, such as the obstetrician who would not have her first child at home.

So the question has to be asked: do Daily Mail sub-editors actually read the stories they are editting, or are they stupid, or are they dishonest?

In fact it is not the mushrooms themselves but an extract of shiitake mushrooms called active hexose correlated compound (AHCC) which appears to have some potential for treating cancer but it should be noted that the investigation is in the early stage, having just completed in vitro tests and one animal trial.

Methods: Selected cervical cancer cells, SiHa (HPV 16/18 positive), and C-33A (HPV negative) were treated in vitro with a single dose AHCC 0.42 mg/mL and incubated for 72 hours. In the second study AHCC dose was repeated once every 24 hours for total of seven days. This was followed by a three arm in vivo study in two xenograft cervical cancer mouse models, SiHa (HPV 16/18 positive), and C-33A (HPV negative), in which each cell line had ten mice for the treatment arm, vehicle control arm and no treatment arm. Mice in the treatment arm received 50 mg/kg AHCC in 0.25 mL of sterile water every day for seven days before the injection of the tumor cells and until the completion of the study. Tumors were measured three times per week. After 90 days of treatment, there was a 30 day observation period to evaluate the potential for recurrence of the HPV infection and the impact on tumor growth. At the end of the study, tumors were extracted and RT-PCR was completed on DNA samples from extracted protein to evaluate the HPV expression.

Results: In vitro treatment with a single dose of AHCC for 72 hour incubation suppressed HPV expression in the first 24 hours but then HPV expression recovered by 48 hours. However, with continuous in vitro exposure, sustained HPV suppression was observed. In the in vivo animal studies, expression of HPV was eradicated with once daily AHCC dosing for 90 days and no detection of HPV expression was sustained after 30 days off treatment. In addition, AHCC daily treatment was associated with a 15.9% decrease in SiHa (HPV 16/18 positive) tumor growth compared to the untreated control (P< 0.05). AHCC did impact the growth rate of the C-33A (HPV negative) tumors.

Conclusion: In conclusion, these data suggest daily dosing of AHCC will eradicate HPV 16/18 infections and may have a role in the prevention of HPV-related cervical cancer. Furthermore, there is a potential for the addition of AHCC to primary treatment regimens for cervical cancer, which may potentially improve response rates and prevent recurrence. A confirmatory pilot study in HPV positive women is underway.

Some observations on this:

First, the mice were dosed with 50 mg/kg AHCC. Scaling that up to a 60 kg human cancer patient would require 3 grammes of the extract per day, which gets interesting if you are trying to use mushrooms rather than the extract, which both the Mail and Natural News imply is possible. I have been trying to find out how much AHCC is found in shiitake mushrooms but have had no joy. But consider this – if they contain 3% AHCC by weight then you would need to consume 100 grammes of mushrooms per day which is doable. If the content were down to 0.3% then you would need to consume a kilogramme of them (four typical supermarket packs) per day. I think you’d get sick of them rather quickly.

Second, these experiments have demonstrated a potential for eradicating cervical cancer but the paper’s authors are much more guarded when they mention AHCC’s potential role as a cancer preventative.

Third, the authors see it as an addition to treatment regimes not a replacement.

Fourth, we have no results for treatment in humans as yet. A pilot study is underway but for AHCC to be approved as a cancer treatment, a whole series of trials need to follow. If positive, these will result in Big Pharma producing AHCC based medicines, at whichpoint Natural News will condemn them as an unnatural product of the cancer industry.

Possibly not what Lewisham Council intended