Investigation Reveals Subway Chicken is only About 50% Chicken DNA

As far as fast-food joints go, Subway is considered to be one of the healthier ones. The chain offers many low-calories menu items, and it agreed to ditch a harmful bread additive found in yoga mats after concerned citizens inked a petition demanding the chemical’s removal. But an investigation by the CDC Marketplace reveals what some are calling a disturbing and disgusting secret about Subway’s chicken strips: they’re not 100% chicken. [1]

It might be time for another petition.

A Marketplace DNA analysis of the chicken, found in Subway’s grilled sandwiches and wraps, found that in the case of 2 popular Subway sandwiches, the strips only contained about 50% chicken DNA.

The investigatory team tested 6 popular fast-food sandwiches:

• McDonald’s Country Chicken (grilled)


• Wendy’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich


• A&W Chicken Grill Deluxe


• Tim Hortons Chipotle Chicken Grilled Wrap


• Subway Oven Roasted Chicken Sandwich


• Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki (chicken strips)

An unadulterated piece of chicken should come in at 100% chicken DNA. Seasoning, processing, and marinating can drop that number, so fast-food chicken seasoned for taste shouldn’t be expected to reach 100%. But out of all the sandwiches tested, Subway had the lowest percentage of chicken DNA:

• A&W Chicken Grill Deluxe – 89.4%

• McDonald’s Country Chicken – 84.9%

• Tim Hortons Chipotle Chicken Grilled Wrap – 86.5%

• Wendy’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich – 88.5%

Subway’s oven-roasted chicken scored a mere 53.6% chicken DNA, while the chain’s chicken strips scored only 42.8% chicken DNA. So, what else comprises most of Subway’s chicken?

Soy.

In other words, you’re not just being fooled when you bite into a Subway chicken sandwich or wrap, you’re also consuming a major potential allergen.

Other Unnecessary Ingredients

The Marketplace investigation found that once the other (read: non-chicken) ingredients are factored in, the fast-food chicken contained about 1/4 less protein than you would get in a home-cooked piece of the poultry. Do you like a side of salt with your healthy chicken wrap? I hope so, because the sodium levels tested proved to be 7-10 times what they would be in a piece of unadulterated chicken.

Subway’s chicken is hardly fresh from the farm, as the company’s ads would have you believe.

Read: 4 Huge Reasons why Soy Should be Avoided

Ben Bohrer, a food scientist at the University of Guelph, says the fast-food industry is well-known for its “restructured products” – smaller pieces of meat or ground meat held together by other ingredients to make them last longer and taste better. It’s a way for fast-food restaurants to make money off unknowing peoples.

If you’re a heart patient who eats at Subway thinking it’s a healthier, lower-salt alternative to McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s, it’s time to start packing your lunch instead.

Not Great for Diabetes, Either

Subway isn’t a great choice for people with diabetes, either. Nutritionist and registered dietitian Christy Brissette says that most of the added ingredients in fast-food meats are variants on salt and sugar, and the added sugar in these products can crank the carbohydrate level of a chicken breast to well above the 0% it should be.

In a statement, Subway said:

“Our recipe calls for one per cent or less of soy protein in our chicken products. We will look into this again with our supplier to ensure that the chicken is meeting the high standard we set for all of our menu items and ingredients.”

Subway Canada said:

“SUBWAY Canada cannot confirm the veracity of the results of the lab testing you had conducted. However, we are concerned by the alleged findings you cite with respect to the proportion of soy content. Our chicken strips and oven roasted chicken contain 1% or less of soy protein. We use this ingredient in these products as a means to help stabilize the texture and moisture. All of our chicken items are made from 100% white meat chicken which is marinated, oven roasted and grilled.”

Additional Sources:

[1] CBC News

[2] IFLScience!

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

Young boy replaces 20 different epilepsy pills with cannabis oil

(Natural News) Perfectly healthy when he was born, little Jayden David was just like any other baby. He was smiley, brought joy to his parents, and he probably kept them up at night too. Somewhere around four months old, everything began to change. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what suddenly started causing the boy to experience abnormal, excessive and synchronous neuronal activity in his brain. What was causing the 4-month-old to suddenly start experiencing fits of vicious epileptic seizures? What had changed so drastically inside the newborn’s brain?

His parents could only think of one thing: to consult doctors and specialists. Instead of investigating the cause, the doctors, with their sincere, good intentions, tried to find ways to suppress the baby’s symptoms with their prescribing power. Thus began a long, dark and winding road of shoving new pills down little Jayden David’s throat.

But even doctors’ good intentions could not overpower the ruthless, failed pharmaceutical science and philosophy they were dishing out. The pills never involved active investigation of the causes of the boy’s seizures, and they never allowed the boy’s body to innately heal. With each doctor’s visit more drugs were prescribed, but the seizures never went away. The boy’s condition worsened, as his body was forced to fight the side effects of multiple drugs.

Twenty-two pharmaceuticals a day were destroying the boy’s life

None of the pharmaceuticals helped. The struggle changed everything for the family. Little Jayden David grew up taking up to 22 prescription drugs a day. The doctors had even got him addicted to a horrifying class of drugs called benzodiazepines. The drugs made Jayden experience hallucinations and fits of screaming and insomnia.

His condition ranged from uncontrolled jerking movements, to a momentary loss of awareness. It was hard to differentiate a seizure from a side effect. Children who experience these fits of abnormal neuron activity are labeled as having a predisposition to epilepsy, but very little research actually investigates what sets off this abnormal neuron activity in the brain. Is it safe to ask if aluminum adjuvant was involved, causing the seizures to start and persist? Maybe the boy had a predisposition to the negative effects of aluminum on neuron activity in the brain.

Whatever the cause, the seizures continued, along with viscous side effects from the prescriptions, until the boy was 5 years old. At one point he had up to 500 seizures a day. With 22 pills going into his body daily, the boy must have felt dead inside, as the intermixing chemical effects manipulated his body and brain. Insurance didn’t always cover the treatments, leaving the boy’s father on the brink of losing his business and his home.

Cannabis oil frees 5-year-old from seizures and 20 prescription drugs

The father fought on, and began looking for new routes to his son’s healing. He had to find a way to get him off the drugs, one at a time. Any relief would have been a breakthrough at this point. When he got his hands on cannabis oil, he hoped for the best, applying the green extract directly into his son’s mouth.

The seizures stopped the first day he took cannabis oil. Now this is not the kind of cannabis that people use for euphoric pleasure. Full spectrum CBD cannabis oil doesn’t produce a high, because the CBDs inhibit the effect of THC in the cell’s receptors.

More importantly, as soon as the CBDs were applied and utilized in the boy’s body, the constant seizures stopped. The father started weaning his son off the prescription drugs. Using cannabis oil, the boy has gone from 22 pills a day and constant seizures, to two pills a day while regaining control over his physical body and state of mind.

Watch their incredible story to learn more about the boy’s amazing recovery using cannabis oil here.

As CBDs grow in popularity, there is also a growing demand for product verification. People want to know exactly what is in their products. The Health Ranger’s CWC Labs, a popular ISO-certified independent lab, touts some of the most accurate hemp CBD testing in the industry.

Sources include:

HealthyLife-Style.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

Floating farm of the future to produce 20 tons of vegetables a day

(Natural News) There is a massive problem threatening mankind’s future: The Earth’s population continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, and our food supply is simply not keeping pace. The total number of people on the planet is expected to reach 8.3 billion by 2030, and by 2050, demand for food will likely have increased by 70 percent. There is clearly a need for innovative ideas to meet this challenge, and a company called Forward Thinking Architecture has risen to the occasion.

A desire to use clean, sustainable energy to produce healthy food which can be sold directly to consumers, eliminating the need for both storage and delivery, gave birth to the idea of the Smart Floating Farm. The concept has already become popular on a smaller scale in the form of vertical hydroponic farms, but the Smart Floating Farm takes the idea to a whole new level.

Forward Thinking Architecture describes floating farms as “a new initiative which can be complementary [sic] and compatible with other existing production methods in order to help reduce food risk associated problems in different areas of the globe.” (RELATED: With the population boom outpacing the growth of our global food supply, it is important to be self-reliant. Stay informed at Preparedness.news.)

The Smart Floating Farm, for which Forward Thinking Architecture won a Sustainable Entrepreneurship Award (SEA) in 2016, produces upwards of 8,000 tons of vegetables each year. Smaller floating farms can be anchored to land in locations all over the world. Each farm floats on a body of water and consists of three tiers. Right at the top is the photovoltaics level which harnesses clean sources of energy like solar power. The crops are grown in the middle level using hydroponics, and this is also the level which people will be able to visit to learn about the process as well as to buy fresh produce. Finally, the lower level is utilized for aquaculture, which is the production of fish and other species.

The Smart Floating Farms come with a slew of benefits, not least of which is the fact that since hydroponics are used, there is no need for the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. Another great benefit is the fact that the multi-level strategy results in a higher yield per meter, freeing up land space for other purposes. Water consumption is also greatly reduced, since the water used in the process is what’s floating under the platform already.

Smart Floating Farms also allow for the protected year-round growing of a diverse array of plant types. Crops will also not be in peril from droughts, floods or other natural disasters, and can be protected from pests without the use of pesticides. Agricultural runoff will be a thing of the past, and new employment opportunities will become available for locals. The direct nature of the farm-to-table way of selling the produce will eliminate the need for machinery, shipping and storage, while dramatically reducing fuel emissions.

Boasting all these advantages, floating farms may well be the future of agriculture, but it may be a while before one reaches an area near you. In the meantime, it is a great idea to become more self-reliant in terms of growing your own fruit and veggies. This will reduce your reliance on others for your family’s food supply, and will mean that you can reap the health benefits of eating non-GMO, organically grown produce year-round.

(Photo credit: Forward Thinking Architecture)

Sources for this article include:

TrueActivist.com

UNWater.org

FAO.org

SmartFloatingFarms.com

Six immune-building foods and herbs you need to consume to stay healthy

(Natural News) Usually, your immune system does an excellent job of protecting your body against disease-causing microbes. However, sometimes bacteria or viruses can slip past your body’s defense line and make you sick. If this happens, many people rely on prescription medication or antibiotics to get rid of the sick-making invaders.

Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 gave rise to the era of antibiotics. While antibiotics have saved many lives in the past, today they don’t seem to be as efficient and revered as they once were. Now they come with a host of health-damaging side effects and add to the growing antibiotic-resistance thread.

Once recognized as one of the greatest advances in conventional medicine, the era of antibiotics is coming to an end. So what do we do? Did you know that our ancestors used immune-building foods and herbs to strengthen their body’s defenses and kill sick-making germs?

While it takes more than an apple a day to keep the doctor away, looking after your immune system and feeding your body the right nutrients are paramount to keep sickness at bay. Below you’ll find a list of six superfoods you should eat regularly to boost your immune system and health.

1.      Iron-rich foods

Iron plays a crucial role in the cytokine-mediated immune response. Too little of this vital trace element can cause inflammation or weaken the immune system significantly. Therefore, it is important to eat a diet rich in iron. Iron-rich foods include organic, grass-fed beef, poultry, fish and seafood, nuts, seeds, and dried fruits. Too much iron, however, especially from non-food sources, can increase the risk of heart disease.

2.      Foods rich in vitamin C

Most of us have probably heard about the importance of vitamin C to support the immune system. Vitamin C may be one of the most important nutrients to protect your overall health. Next to boosting the production of T helper (Th) cells, a type of T cell that plays a crucial role in the regulation of the immune response, it also supports antibacterial activity, fights inflammation, and works as a powerful antioxidant to prevent free radical damage. Furthermore, vitamin C promotes the formation of skin, epithelial, and endothelial barriers. Foods rich in vitamin C include citrus fruits, bell peppers, dark leafy greens, broccoli, berries, snap peas, and papaya.

3.      Garlic

Used for thousands of years to fight a common cold, you shouldn’t fear garlic’s pungent smell but add it to as many dishes as you can. One study, published in Advances in Therapy, found that people who supplemented their diet with garlic had significantly fewer colds than the placebo group and recovered faster when infected.

4.      Ginger

Known for its anti-nausea and immune-supporting properties, ginger can help the body ward off infections. Additionally, ginger possesses some great anti-inflammatory properties, which speeds up the healing process if you do get sick.

5.      Cat’s claw

Cat’s claw may be less known to most of people, but when it comes to your health, it has shown some tremendous immune boosting effects. A tea made from the root and bark may trigger the immune system and boost the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. Just like ginger, Cat’s claw is a powerful anti-inflammatory herb which promotes a fast recovery.

6.      Astragalus

Another lesser known herb you should start to use to improve your health is astragalus. Used for centuries by Chinese medicine practitioners, astragalus has shown to increase the immune cells in the bone marrow and lymph tissues. The root can be added to soups or stew to soften its tough structure, or you can opt for a high-quality herbal supplement instead. (RELATED: Stay Informed about high-quality supplements at SupplementsReport.com.)

Sources:

OffTheGridNews.com

ACS.org

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

Stop overlooking this powerful medicinal melon in your grocery store

(Natural News) You may never have heard of Momordica charantia, also known as bitter melon, bitter gourd, bitter squash or balmspear, but it has been a medicinal staple in India and China for hundreds of years, and its health benefits are far sweeter than its name may suggest.

The bitter melon is a tropical fruit that can be eaten whole or can be purchased as a supplement derived from the fruit and seeds. In addition to being both an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, the bitter melon has also been proven to be a powerful weapon in the fight against several cancers, including pancreatic cancer.

The website Cancer.net reveals that approximately 53,070 adults, including 27,670 men and 25,400 women, die from pancreatic cancer each year. It is the 9^th most common cancer in women, and the 4^th most common overall among both men and women.

New hope in the fight against this deadly form of cancer was unveiled in 2013, when the University of Colorado Cancer Center published a study in the journal Carcinogenesis entitled “Bitter melon juice prevents pancreatic cancer in mouse models.”

The researchers discovered that when they administered 5mg of freeze-dried bitter melon juice to mice with pancreatic tumors once a day, their tumors reduced by 64 percent more than those of untreated mice. In contrast, the tumors of mice that were given a chemotherapy drug only shrank by 52 percent. Scientists determined that the bitter melon juice restricted the ability of pancreatic cancer cells to metabolize glucose, effectively starving and eventually killing those cells. On a side note, the mice that received the bitter melon juice were also 60 percent less likely to develop diabetes than the control mice.

“It’s a very exciting finding,” said Rajesh Agarwal, co-program leader of Cancer Prevention and Control at the CU Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “Many researchers are engineering new drugs to target cancer cells’ ability to supply themselves with energy, and here we have a naturally-occurring compound that may do just that.”

Another study is currently underway at the St. Louis University under the leadership of Dr. Ratna Ray, Ph.D. The study is investigating whether bitter melon could be used to prevent not just pancreatic, but also prostrate and other forms of cancer, including head and neck cancers. Dr. Ray believes that since bitter melon has demonstrated the ability to provoke apoptosis (cell death) in many types of cancer, it holds great potential for the future of all cancer treatment.

The benefits of bitter melon go way beyond cancer prevention and treatment. This amazing fruit can also break down kidney stones, helping the body to rid itself of them naturally, while reducing the acid that often contributes to the development of these painful stones in the first place. It also helps reduce dangerously high cholesterol levels naturally, without the need for dangerous statin medications.

Those suffering from skin conditions, including eczema, psoriasis and acne, can benefit from the “glowing” effects of consuming bitter melon.

Bitter melon is also both very low in calories and very filling, making it an excellent choice for those hoping to lose weight. And the same properties that make it a potent diabetes fighter also aid in weight loss. (RELATED: Did you know that bitter melon is a more powerful weapon against type 2 diabetes than prescription medications? Find out more here.)

Other benefits of this true superfood include preventing or alleviating food allergies; ridding the body of yeast infections; relieving acid indigestion and reflux; and boosting Vitamin K levels, thereby reducing pain and inflammation in the joints.

A closer look at this funny looking fruit with the bitter name proves it to be a truly powerful natural medication that we should all try to incorporate in our diets.

Find more news on healing vegetables at Veggie.news.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalHealth365.com

ScienceDaily.com

Cancer.net

LifeHack.org

NaturalNews.com

VeryWell.com

$120M in counterfeit designer cosmetics seized in China

(Natural News) Chinese police have seized $120 million worth of counterfeit luxury cosmetics in an ongoing series of raids against a major crime ring.

The fake merchandise, consisting of 1,200 boxes falsely branded with the labels Chanel, Christian Dior, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal SA’s Lancôme, was seized in a series of seven separate raids. Fifteen people were arrested, and 13 of them have been charged with crimes.

The ongoing operation began last year, when reports surfaced that an online store was selling cosmetics falsely labeled with the Amway brand name. Chinese police investigated and eventually raided the online store’s warehouse, confiscating 100 boxes of counterfeit Amway cosmetics worth $30,000. That raid led to information that allowed police to identify the seven other operations that were recently raided.

A major industry

According to police, the counterfeit cosmetics ring was distributing fake products nationwide. The fake products were sold for a 900 percent profit. The counterfeiters had a policy of quickly responding to any complaints with a full refund, in the hopes of avoiding calls to the police.

One man has allegedly confessed to running the manufacturing end of the ring. He says that he bought the ingredients online, then purchased the packaging from Guangdong province to the south. The bar codes on the boxes were copied from authentic products.

Guangdong province appears to be a major center for this type of activity. In 2015, there were 56 raids in that province alone, netting counterfeit cosmetics valued at $11 million. Those products were being produced by just two workers. In some cases, they had bribed employees of the actual cosmetics companies in order to acquire the special anti-counterfeiting packaging used on the real products.

In 2012, the U.K. Intellectual Property Office published a report warning that counterfeiting of cosmetics was on the rise globally, with China playing the leading role. That same year, Chinese police seized more than $3 million of bogus cosmetics, including counterfeit Botox.

Just days before the most recent raids, the Hong Kong cosmetics chain Colourmix was levied with a  fine of more than $20,000 for possession 481 makeup bottles falsely labeled with the brand name Bioderma. The bottles had been identified in a raid in 2015.

Fraud at all levels

Counterfeiting of all types is a major business in China, which the government struggles unsuccessfully to suppress. Every year, tens of thousands of people are arrested for producing and selling false goods.

In January, Chinese police shut down a hub of 50 separate factories that were producing seasonings falsely labeled with major brand names, such as Nestle and Knorr. The seasonings were made primarily with industrial-grade salt, artificial colors, and food additives. Police said they believed that the factories had been in operation for more than a decade. (Related: Learn more about counterfeit ingredients from China.)

Public interest activists have warned that the culture of counterfeiting places the safety of consumers at risk — not just those in China, but anyone who purchases or consumes products manufactured there.

Even scientific research in China is widely fabricated, according to a recent study by the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA). The agency spent a year reviewing clinical trials of drugs submitted for approval, and found that 80 percent contained data that had been fabricated.

Implicated in the research fraud were pharmaceutical companies, medical staff, and intermediaries.

Not that this particular problem is necessarily limited to China. According to world renowned medical scientist John Ioannidis, the medical research system is so rife with fake data that it may be irredeemable.

Ioannidis says that consciously or unconsciously, researchers skew their data in a hundred tiny ways to get the hoped for results. These ways include asking the wrong research questions, recruiting the wrong populations, measuring the wrong variables, designing interventions poorly, analyzing data poorly, and presenting results inaccurately.

Sources for this article include:

SecuringIndustry.com

Telegraph.co.uk

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

Japan: HPV vaccine on trial for its horrifying side effects

(Natural News) Since last July, a total of 119 young girls and women in Japan have filed lawsuits against both the Japanese government and the two manufacturers of vaccines for human papillomavirus (HPV), GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK) and Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. According to the suits, the companies’ respective HPV vaccines, Cervarix and Gardasil, caused the women to suffer serious side effects, for which they are now seeking damages.

Some of the latest suits include 28 cases in which women ranging in age from 15 to 22 developed major health conditions like chronic pain all over their bodies, impaired mobility, severe menstrual pain, and other problems following the series of vaccines. These women are suing not only the vaccine manufacturers for producing the deadly jabs, but also the Japanese government for approving them without proper vetting.

One young woman by the name of Erina Sonoda, a 20-year-old college student, told The Japan Times (JT) that she developed horrible menstrual pains following her second vaccination with Cervarix, which is administered as three separate jabs. Sonoda went through with her third vaccination despite the menstrual problems, and following this last course developed pains throughout the rest of her body, for which she now has difficulty walking without a cane, and often has to use a wheelchair.

“I felt acute pain as if someone was squashing my internal organs … Such conditions have only gotten worse,” Sonoda told a court while sitting in her wheelchair. Sonoda is seeking the U.S. equivalent of about $134,000 as compensation for her injuries. “I received the shots because the government recommended it. I want the government to take seriously its responsibility for causing us (to suffer from) such symptoms.”

Nearly 3,000 Japanese women have reported side effects from HPV vaccines since they were first recommended — then two months later un-recommended — in 2013

Many others like Sonoda have suffered similar problems after getting HPV vaccinations, including more than 100 other plaintiffs throughout Japan who say their lives have never been the same since following the government’s advice. Rather than obtain the protection against cervical cancer that they were promised, many of these women are now permanently injured and in need of constant medical care.

The Japanese government, GSK, and Merck all deny that there is any causal link between HPV vaccines and serious side effects, hence their efforts to have the compensation claims denied. These entities claim that no scientific evidence exists to show any dangers from HPV vaccines, but tell that to the nearly 3,000 women throughout Japan who have reported serious side effects since the government first started recommending the vaccines back in April 2013. Two months later, the government stopped recommending HPV vaccines following a spate of controversy from major reported side effects.

Japan’s Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry openly admits that some 2,945 individuals have reported side effects from HPV vaccines over the past four some-odd years. At the same time, the ministry says that side effects from the vaccines are rare, and that the women who claim to have been injured by them must have been injured by something else.

Back in 2016, it was reported that vaccination rates for HPV in Japan plummeted from about 70 percent to a mere one percent after controversy over the vaccine’s safety went mainstream around June 2013. When the Japanese public found out that their government was using their tax dollars to support the push for more women to get vaccinated for HPV, the outcry that ensued was enough to get the program stopped in a matter of weeks. HPV vaccines are still offered to women in Japan, but the government no longer officially recommends them.

Sources for this article include:

JapanTimes.co.jp

Medscape.com