"Trust But Verify"--Health Care Stakeholders to Pledge $2 Trillion in Reductions

This from the Wall Street Journal on Sunday:Major health-care providers are planning to pledge Monday to President Barack Obama that they will work to reduce cost increases in the nation's health-care system by $2 trillion over the next decade, officials said…Groups representing hospitals, health-insurance companies, doctors, drug makers, medical-device makers and labor are joining in Monday's

Dihydro-Vitamin K1

Step right up ladies and gents; I have a new miracle vitamin for you. Totally unknown to our ignorant pre-industrial ancestors, it's called dihydro-vitamin K1. It's formed during the oil hydrogenation process, so the richest sources are hydrogenated fats like margarine, shortening and commercial deep fry oil. Some of its benefits may include:

• Inhibiting vitamin K2 metabolism
• Reducing bone mineral density
  
• Causing organ damage and inhibiting platelet formation in animal models
• Dramatically increasing the death rate of spontaneously hypertensive rats

Dihydro-vitamin K1 accounts for roughly 30% of the vitamin K intake of American children, and a substantial portion of adult intake as well. Over 99 percent of Americans have it in their diet. Research on dihydro-vitamin K1 is in its infancy at this point, so no one has a very solid idea of its effects on the body beyond some preliminary and disturbing suggestions from animal experiments and brief human trials.

This could be another mechanism by which industrially processed vegetable oils degrade health. It's also another example of why it's not a good idea to chemically alter food. We don't understand food, or our bodies, well enough to know the long-term consequences of foods that have been recently introduced to the human diet. I believe these foods should be avoided on principle.

An Open Letter to the Men and Women Over at the CBO--Hang In There!

Last November I did a post: To the Congressional Budget Office: Please Keep Playing it Straight!In it I said:I hope the CBO doesn't cave to political pressure and keeps doing its non-partisan down-the-middle job.If I hear the politicians whining and the special interests squealing about CBO's conclusions about how these cost containment "lite" proposals...don't save much money I know the CBO pros