How about the US adopts the "loser pay" rule for lawsuits that has been so successful in cutting down frivolous lawsuits in Germany? Guess who is most opposed to that-you guessed it, lawyers! (Read Catherine Crier's book "The Case Against Lawyers" to get an idea of just how bad the problem is in this country). But it sure would cut down on so many of the frivolous suits out there, as well as other benefits...

Just a side note to the comment about polluted herbs from China. I learned just last week that many of our "organic" foods are coming from China as well as other countries. Yet they bear the "USDA Organic" label on them. A call to the US Dept. of Agriculture yielded the shocking news that there is a third party certification system that oversees crops in other countries and which certifies whether a crop meets US organic standards...talk about the fox guarding the hen house! These certifiers are not even US citizens, all that is required is that they know what our organic standards are. Yea, right.

So I guess the point is that "USDA Organic" does not mean, as I thought, that it is organically grown here in the USA. Hope not everyone knew this already but me!

Does anyone know - or perhaps it's in the crier book lfac (you are now an acronym for lazy people...lol) recommended. I have a feeling that reading it could possibly give me a stroke.

Anyway question: just how much of our food supply comes from China andf or how long it has been coming? Maybe my activism goals have to be modified to a different level. Can all the college librarians out there try to get figures on what we eat - and where it specifically comes from? Does anyone know how to build a good database? Good info is just info if you don't move it to another level. All you need is a team.

There are people out there that can and will and should .......pay for it. We're at the place where there needs to be a 'function at the junction." You get the idea....ONline records and sharing ...transparency...give it away......you can't get every single food in the universe, but all data helps to see patterns.

ok i will stop now but i sense a good group of interested people and surely hope you continue in this thread with others moving in.

thanks my fellow parkinsonians, lol
what a lousy politician I would make, I would break out into instant dyskinesia if I tried to lie to a camera..the body language experts would just write me off as being "unreadable", with many signs of paranoia and drunkenness"?

let's get loud!
paula

Edited to add: have non pwp on your team and don't sweat the fields too much if you build a database - just do it as quickly and accurately as you can. Don't ever forget that there is a reason you don't work...lol

http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com

http://www.consumerlab.com

THese aren't really food....food varies SO much, especially fresh produce...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22fo...ient=firefox-a

A Shot Of Big Pharma
John Dobosz 05.07.08, 6:25 PM ET

http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/07/pfi...ech_newsletter


Going against the grain can produce nice gains. After all, it's hard to buy low and sell high when you pay too much for a stock. If your investing time horizon is longer than 18 months, there's a good case to be made that you should be increasing your allocation to the beaten-down drug stocks.

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Charles Biderman, CEO of Trimtabs, recommends taking a long position in the Health Care Select Sector SPDR (amex: XLV), an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that holds stocks of companies engaged in sales of health care equipment and services, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

Year-to-date, the XLV is down about 15%, giving back the gains it made in the second half of 2007 as investors braced their portfolios for a recession and bear market. Biderman, who tracks flows of funds into mutual funds, ETFs and hedge funds, points out that liquidity is currently most bullish in the XLV and the Technology Select Sector SPDR (amex: XLK). In his Trimtabs model portfolio, Biderman recommends that readers take a 60% position in the XLV.

Some of the top holdings in the XLV include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Abbott Laboratoriesand UnitedHealth Group.

One of the reasons that Biderman recommends being bullish on U.S. stocks is that net insider selling has averaged only $80 million daily for the past eight weeks, and has been less than $1 billion in every week so far in 2008.

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"The best-informed market participants--the top insiders who run U.S. public companies--continued to send very bullish signals through their actions in the stock market," says Biderman. "The $4.7 billion in net insider selling in the first four months of 2008 was the lowest amount we have ever measured in a four-month period, which suggests insiders are anticipating big gains rather than big losses in stock prices over the next few months."

In addition, the U.S. economy does not appear to be accelerating to the downside, with new jobless claims for April coming in less than expected. Plus, tax withholdings suggest that incomes are holding up nicely.

"The U.S. economy that almost everyone left for dead is sputtering back to life," notes Biderman. "If and when withholding gains again top 5% year-over-year, we would probably turn leveraged bullish, everything else being equal."

I guess my next question is that I wonder if anyone is looking for any correlations between imported products from China and the rise of PD or autism. That sounds like a massive job though.

paula

Well, in that case stuff from China probably isn't the only culprit since there seem to be so many toxins in our environment. Sigh. I don't even eat fish anymore....

I hope I didn't lead anyone to believe we should only be concerned about food coming from China, I think we should be concerned about food coming from any country that does not have as rigid, or more rigid, food production standards that we do. Europe, for example, has tougher laws on dairy products: farmers are not allowed to give their cows the milk-producing hormone (and has not for years), so that their conventional (ie, non-organic) dairy products may be better than our own conventional dairy products here at home, because we are allowed to use those hormones in the cows.

Part of the concern is also buying and eating foods grown in other countries that are not in season where we live. Should we really be able to buy melons in the dead of winter? There is actually a cookbook called "Eating in Season" put out by a local farm in my town that highlights what foods we should eat and when. It would be hard to follow, though, since in winter you get to eat kale, chard, turnips, squash, turnips, and potatoes, yum, yum! Not sure we could do that for a whole winter, but if that's all that were available.....we'd have to, and we'd survive.

The news of organic food not necessarily being grown on our soil made our local newspaper, so there is a lot of interest, and concern, out there. I guess my point in all of this was just awareness of where your food is really coming from. PWP need extra nutritious food and that may or may not be what you are getting and paying for at the grocery store.

Tip: if you cannot find the country of origin on the food label, don't buy it. And be careful of labels that indicate a food product is distributed or marketed by an American company, but it is actually grown elsewhere (or fails to specifically state "Product of USA" or similar). So many labels, so little time.

I was a lazy typer but did use the word global in the title [ that is my lame excuse..lol]

Well there are quite a few indicators of change coming. You can see it in introduced legislation, in restructuring the NIH, funding the FDA, legislation has never read better for us...it's golng to get very interesting and for my generation it's now or never.

I think there have been some very busy goings on ...i am almost excited but you''d never know it from the grimace on my face as i'm trying to type this....ha

need a break,
paula

among other edits adding: I'll be sure to pack spectacles and a magnifying glass for all shopping.

Paula you are correct there are many indicators of change. Along with the items you listed; more interaction between PWP and researchers, researchers attending the PAN Forum and going to congressional offices with PWPs, more emphasis on translational clinical research.