Did "Quantum Vision" Just Reveal the Truth About Glasses?

It’s another year, and now the eye doctor wants you to get another, thicker pair of lenses. Just looking at this screen is getting to be a pain, so that must be right. That’s not what The Quantum Vision System has to say about it. The Quantum Vision eyesight restoration program claims it can get you back to having 20/20 vision in as short amount of time as two weeks.

If it’s true, the idea that you could have 20/20 vision all over again—maybe for the first time in your life—would be like having a brand new pair of eyes. So what’s this all about? The Quantum Vision System says that there is a dirty secret behind the entire eye care industry. Their claim is that no matter what you suffer from—whether it’s near sightedness, far sightedness, presbyopia, glaucoma, macular degeneration or something worse—they are all conditions that were created by improperly using your eyes. The good news, they say, is that these problems can be completely reversed.

There is something to the idea that the glasses industry is out to create more glasses wearers. Any optician knows first hand how much money is made off of people who need glasses. Almost seven billion dollars are made every year on contact lenses alone. The rest of the industry brings in almost twice that. If The Quantum Vision System means never having to buy another pair of contacts, it means not letting the industry get any more of your money.

For people getting older it means being able to see the way you used to again. Quantum Vision says it’s possible, and it doesn’t involve any risky surgical procedures. It’s a program that claims to have helped almost 46,400 people since it’s been made available.

Reverse your vision back to a 20/20 state? Check out this FREE VIDEO to see what it’s all about and share your views on this with us in the comments below.

Did "Quantum Vision" Just Reveal the Truth About Glasses?

Supreme Court Says Dentists Can’t Decide Who Gets to Whiten Your Teeth | TIME

Getty Images

The Supreme Court has ruled that dentists can't hold a monopoly on teeth-whitening services

Dentists cannot have a monopoly on teeth whitening services, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

The Supreme Court found that the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners was wrong when it sent “cease and desist” letters to companies that were offering teeth whitening at strip malls and kiosks. The board held that it was regulating the practice, but it was sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for creating an advantage for its members and blocking competition.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the FTC, agreeing that the board was acting on behalf of private members and not as a state regulatory agency since it was not being actively monitored by the state.

North Carolina law does not specify whether teeth whitening is a practice only allowed by dentists. The smaller businesses were offering the procedures for a lower costs than the dentists.

The Supreme Court has ruled that dentists can't hold a monopoly on teeth-whitening services

Alexandra Sifferlin

Supreme Court Says Dentists Can’t Decide Who Gets to Whiten Your Teeth | TIME

Smoking’s Health Toll Worse Than Previously Thought, Study Says

 

However bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse.

A new study adds at least five diseases and 60,000 deaths a year to the toll taken by tobacco in the United States. Before the study, smoking was already blamed for nearly half a million deaths a year in this country from 21 diseases, including 12 types of cancer.

The new findings are based on health data from nearly a million people who were followed for 10 years. In addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, the researchers found that smoking was also linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco.

Even though people are already barraged with messages about the dangers of smoking, researchers say it is important to let the public know that there is yet more bad news.

 

“The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” said Brian D. Carter, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society and the first author of an article about the study, which appears in The New England Journal of Medicine. “It’s not a done story.”

Photo

Researchers have found that smoking is linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

In an editorial accompanying the article, Dr. Graham A. Colditz, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said that the new findings showed that officials in the United States had substantially underestimated the effect smoking had had on public health. He said smokers, particularly those who depended on Medicaid, had not been receiving enough help to quit.

About 42 million Americans smoke — 15 percent of women and 21 percent of men — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research has shown that their death rates are two to three times higher than those of people who never smoked, and that on average they die more than a decade before nonsmokers. Smokers are more than 20 times as likely as nonsmokers to die of lung cancer. Poor people and those with less formal education are the most likely to smoke.

Mr. Carter said he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. The participants were 421,378 men and 532,651 women 55 and older, including nearly 89,000 current smokers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers. But diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.”

The research was paid for by the American Cancer Society, and Mr. Carter worked with scientists from four universities and the National Cancer Institute.

The study was observational, meaning that it looked at people’s habits like smoking and noted statistical correlations between their behavior and their health. Correlation does not prove cause and effect, so this kind of research is not considered as strong as experiments in which participants are assigned at random to treatments or placebos, and then compared. But people cannot ethically be instructed to smoke for a study, so a lot of the data on smoking’s effects on people comes from observational studies.

Analyzing deaths among the participants from 2000 to 2011, the researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. Smokers were also six times more likely to die from a rare illness caused by insufficient blood flow to the intestines.

Mr. Carter said he had confidence in the findings because biologically, it made sense that those conditions were related to tobacco. Smoking can weaken the immune system, increasing the risk of infection, he said. It is also known to cause diabetes, high blood pressure and artery disease, all of which can lead to kidney problems. Artery disease can also choke off the blood supply to the intestines. Lung damage from smoke, combined with increased vulnerability to infection, can lead to multiple respiratory illnesses.

Two other observations supported the findings, he said. One was that the more heavily a person smoked, the greater the added risks. The second was that among former smokers, the risks diminished over time. In general, such effects — known as a dose response — suggest that an observed correlation is more than a coincidence.

The study also found small increases in the risks of breast and prostate cancer among smokers. Mr. Carter said those findings were not as strong as the others, adding that additional research could help determine whether there were biological mechanisms that would support a connection.

A 2014 report by the surgeon general’s office said the evidence for a causal connection between smoking and breast cancer was “suggestive but not sufficient.” For prostate cancer, the same report found no evidence that smoking caused prostate cancer — but it noted that in men who did have prostate cancer, smoking seemed to worsen the outcome.

The diseases that had previously been established by the surgeon general as caused by smoking were cancers of the esophagus, stomach, colon, liver, pancreas, larynx, lung, bladder, kidney, cervix, lip and oral cavity; acute myeloid leukemia; diabetes; heart disease; stroke; atherosclerosis; aortic aneurysm; other artery diseases; chronic lung disease; pneumonia, influenza; and tuberculosis.

By DENISE GRADY

Smoking’s Health Toll Worse Than Previously Thought, Study Says

Puerto Rico considers plan to fine parents of obese children

Legislators in Puerto Rico are debating a bill that would fine parents of obese children up to $800 if they don’t lose weight.

The bill aims to improve children’s wellbeing and help parents make healthier choices, senator Gilberto Rodriguez said in a statement issued Monday.

Public hearings for the bill are scheduled to begin on Friday.

If approved, public school teachers would flag potential obesity cases and refer them to a counselor or social worker, depending on the severity of the case. Health department officials would then meet with the parents and determine whether the obesity is a result of bad eating habits or a medical condition. They also would create a diet-and-exercise program combined with monthly visits to ensure it’s being followed.

After six months, officials would evaluate the child again, with parents possibly facing between $500 and $800 in fines if the situation does not improve within another six months to a year.

The US Centers for Disease Control defines childhood obesity as having a body mass index or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.

Several doctors including the president of Puerto Rico’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics have spoken out against the measure, saying it is unfair.

More than 28% of children in Puerto Rico are considered obese, compared with some 18% in the US mainland.

 

 Puerto Rican children train on stationary bikes inside the gym in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Close to 30% of children in Puerto Rico are classified as obese but critics have spoken out against the measure as draconian and unfair

Puerto Rico considers plan to fine parents of obese children

Did "Restore My Vision Today" Just Reveal the Truth About Glasses?

It’s another year, and now the eye doctor wants you to get another, thicker pair of lenses. Just looking at this screen is getting to be a pain, so that must be right. That’s not what Samantha Pearson and her partner Dr. Sen have to say about it. They have developed the eyesight restoration program entitled Restore My Vision Today, which claims it can get you back to having 20/20 vision in as short amount of time as two weeks.

If it’s true, the idea that you could have 20/20 vision all over again—maybe for the first time in your life—would be like having a brand new pair of eyes. So what’s this all about? Restore My Vision Today says that there is a dirty secret behind the entire eye care industry. Their claim is that no matter what you suffer from—whether it’s near sightedness, far sightedness, presbyopia, glaucoma, macular degeneration or something worse—they are all conditions that were created by improperly using your eyes. The good news, they say, is that these problems can be completely reversed.

There is something to the idea that the glasses industry is out to create more glasses wearers. Dr Sen himself, at 85 years old, knows first hand how much money is made off of people who need glasses. Almost seven billion dollars are made every year on contact lenses alone. The rest of the industry brings in almost twice that. If Restore My Vision Today means never having to buy another pair of contacts, it means not letting the industry get any more of your money.

For people getting older it means being able to see the way you used to again. Restore My Vision Today says it’s possible, and it doesn’t involve any risky surgical procedures. It’s a program that claims to have helped almost 46,400 people since it’s been made available.

Reverse your vision back to a 20/20 state? Check out this FREE VIDEO to see what it’s all about and share your views on this with us in the comments below.

Did "Restore My Vision Today" Just Reveal the Truth About Glasses?

Where people around the world eat the most sugar and fat [Diagram]

Where people around the world eat the most sugar and fat - The Washington Post

Where people around the world eat the most sugar and fat

We all know Americans love their sugar. But data from market research firm Euromonitor suggest that the love may border on lunacy, at least compared with the rest of the world.

Here in the United States, the average person consumes more than 126 grams of sugar per day, which is slightly more than three 12-ounce cans of Coca-Cola. That's more than twice the average sugar intake of all 54 countries observed by Euromonitor. It's also more than twice what the World Health Organization recommends for daily intake, which is roughly 50 grams of sugar for someone of normal weight.

In Germany, the second-most sugar-loving nation in the world, people eat roughly 103 grams on average. In the Netherlands, the country with the third-biggest sweet tooth, people eat 102.5 grams. And in Ireland, which ranks fourth on the list, sugar intake falls just short of 97 grams.

At the other end of the spectrum are India, Israel, Indonesia and China, where people apparently don't like sweets. In India, people eat only about 5 grams per day on average. In Israel, it's 14.5 grams. In Indonesia, it's just over 15 grams. And in China, it's just under 16 grams.

The good news for Americans is that they fare a bit better when it comes to fat consumption.

Belgium, where people eat 95 grams of fat each day on average, holds the distinction of being the world's most fat-crazed country. Germany, where people eat 86.5 grams of fat each day on average, is second. Finland, where people eat just shy of 81 grams, is third. And the Netherlands, where people eat just over 80 grams, is fourth. The United States is 16th on the list, at 65.5 grams, roughly 12 grams more than the average seen across the 54 countries.

India, Indonesia and South Korea, where people eat the least amount of fat, consume 10 grams, 15.5 grams, and just over 20 grams per capita, respectively.

The U.S. government recommends that people "aim for a total fat intake of no more than 30 percent of calories." Assuming that people consume 2,000 calories a day (which they don't, but let's assume they do), that would mean about 65 grams of fat. So Americans aren't doing all that bad.

By Roberto A. Ferdman

Where people around the world eat the most sugar and fat - The Washington Post