Antice — if you want some good news (but unrelated to this thread), some significant political momentum has built up behind building new nuclear plants here in Minnesota. A large number of politicians want to overturn the statewide ban on nuke plants, on the basis that the ban resulted in a large increase in coal burning plants. It’s nice to see someone thinking about consequences for a change, but it’s a shame that it took the actual consequences to spur it on. I bet that the controversial proposed Big Stone Lake power plant (coal fired) had something to do with it. So far, the main opposition has actually not been environmental; it’s come from politicians who are concerned that rescinding the ban will a) not actually result in new nuclear plants and b) somehow make power companies raise prices without raising services. I’m not clear on how “b” is supposed to happen, which makes me suspect it’s just fearmongering (possibly from the power companies themselves, who, while they would benefit in the long run from a new plant, won’t benefit in the short run, the period in which their executives get their bonuses).

If you search for aluminum toxicity online you will find it is very popular in the “alternative” movement. It’s on every herbal woo-woo site you can think of. There is still no proof that it ever causes neurological problems in humans except in extraordinary circumstances.

On mercury: It is true that there will be some mercury in anyone’s body and chelation will up the levels in the urine (along with every other metal and many other things). You can’t ever hope to get mercury levels down to zero (if there is even any reason to) because mercury bearing minerals are common enough to make it present in almost any growing soil and in water at low levels. However, it could be lowered considerably because more than half of the biologically mobile mercury, which ends up accumulating in fish, dissolving in surface water and being inhaled by humans comes from coal burners.

Aluminum in the form of oxides is so common in the earth’s crust everyone is exposed to enormous amounts of it, and always has been through any number of natural materials including clays, soils and so on.

I am aware that in some narrow circumstances, aluminum in excessive amounts can compete with the absorption of calcium or can cause some other narrow problems when exposure is very very excessive. It was once theorized that it might be related to Alzheimers, as some of the plaques contained a large proportion of aluminum atoms, but research has not born this out and it is now thought that the plaques just have a tendency to accumulate aluminum ions and it’s not a causal factor.

There has been some talk for a long time about aluminum causing greater expression of estrogen-related traits and therefore things like breast cancer. That is based on some very narrow laboratory experiments with the effect of aluminum compounds on hormone receptors, but it’s very weak, even then and in the real world, extensive research has failed to find any empirical evidence of a connection.

It’s certainly interesting. And about as plausible as homeopathy.

        Calli Arcale said:

EMF opens up the blood-brain barrier? That’s a new one.

Actually it’s not – or at least not brand-new. I don’t remember which assclown cooked it up, it was Carlo or Hardell or something, but their claim was that toxins enter the brain because EMF’s open the blood-brain barrier or that the RF radiation causes heavy metals to become embedded in cells or that the “cells can’t tell the difference between nutrients and toxins”

Something totally woo-woo like that. Complete bull, but Lisa is not the first to say this.

There is earlier evidence for use of wild cereals: anthropological and archaeological evidence from sites across Southwest Asia and North Africa indicate use of wild grain (e.g., from the ca. 20,000 BC site of Ohalo II in Israel, many Natufian sites in the Levant and from sites along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC). There is even evidence of planned cultivation and trait selection: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication. It isn’t until after 9,500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale.

Notably, most of the crops listed in that section are off-limits to people with celiac disease. Note also that this discusses when the crops were domesticated; they were certainly used prior to domestication, or nobody would’ve thought to domesticate them. Indeed, there is archeological evidence that people were gathering wild emmer wheat 17,500 years ago. They just didn’t know how to cultivate it yet.

It’s worse than that: they’re using standard tests, with standard baselines, for detecting mercury overdoses. But instead of using plain old urine, like you’re supposed to do, they give the kids a chelating agent ahead of time and then collect the urine. They call this a “provoked” mercury screen. It virtually guarantees that the child’s urine mercury levels will exceed the normal baseline. The scammers try to justify this, saying that the provoked testing is needed to flush out “hidden stores” of mercury. But they don’t even try to find out what a normal baseline for a provoked urine test is! It’s a huge scam.

Lisa @ 13:
I’m guessing you haven’t visited this blog before, if you’re going to ramp up the RF woo. This blog has spent a significant amount of time debunking the claim that radio sources such as WiFi, cell phones, etc are harmful.

I’m also amazed at how scatter-shot your “theory” of autism is. Is there anything that’s *not* a factor for autism? It is true that all autistic people have mercury in their bodies. This is because all people, period, have mercury in their bodies. The only people who describe autism as “a novel kind of mercury poisoning” are people who do not study toxicology and do not know what mercury poisoning actually looks like. Most are well-meaning but closed-minded types, who are not interested in learning the truth because they think they already know it. A few are actual frauds.

Did you know that aluminum is one of the most common elements on Earth? (It’s #13 in abundance, more common than essential elements like iron and calcium.) Good luck excluding that from your diet.

Gluten is not a natural part of our diet? Ah. I guess that explains why humans have been eating it for over 10,000 years, and why it is the protein most closely linked with the rise of human civilization.

“Opens up the intestinal wall”? Gluten does no such thing. Celiac disease (which is not an allergy, but a different sort of autoimmune problem) can damage the intestines so badly they eventually die and rupture, but that’s quite a bit more extreme than the “leaky gut” alleged by the autism quacks. Truthfully, if you have celiac disease, you won’t absorb more nutrients than a normal person. You’ll absorb less. Indeed, the first symptom is often malnutrition despite adequate dietary intake.

EMF opens up the blood-brain barrier? That’s a new one. Usually, the woo-woos claim it either microwaves the brain tissue or causes mutations. I haven’t heard a claim that radio “opens up the blood-brain barrier”. If true, it’s odd that we haven’t seen a vast increase in alcohol-related deaths, since most people use cell phones these days, and opening up the blood brain barrier would increase intoxication. Yet baseline information on alcohol intoxication created decades ago is still valid. Odd, that.

Or maybe you just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.