American Diabetes Association

Drug panels loaded with docs on the make

Think your doc's concern about your cholesterol levels comes from a genuine interest in your health? Think again: It comes from a set of guidelines created by "experts" who were bought and paid for by the companies that make cholesterol meds.

A new look at 14 guidelines on cholesterol and diabetes finds that 52 percent of the 288 panelists who authored them had direct financial links to the drug industry -- including HALF of all panel chairs.

And the biggest conflicts of all were found on the most influential panels of all -- the guideline-writing committees of groups such as the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association, where a whopping 69 percent of the members had financial links to drug makers.

But that's not exactly a shocker: Groups like the AHA and ADA rake in so much dough from Big Pharma that they're practically drug industry divisions themselves. Want proof? Go take a peek at the financial statements on their Web sites.

Bottom line here is that behind every wildly successful drug on the market there's a badly conflicted panel that was PAID to push it -- no matter how dangerous and unnecessary those drugs are.

And yes, they are unnecessary -- because your problem isn't high cholesterol. In fact, your cholesterol is almost certainly TOO LOW!

I know that sounds crazy, and your own doctor will throw you out of the exam room if you try to argue with him on that. But all he has to back him up are those crooked guidelines.

Me? I've got SCIENCE on my side, and I've laid it all out for you right here.

It's not just cholesterol and diabetes meds: The guidelines on everything from heart disease to cancer screenings have been written by "experts" rolling in industry money -- so you can always count on them to protect the industry's interests over yours.

That means it's more important than ever to find a doc who's not for sale -- but harder than ever to find one. If you're looking, I suggest you start your search by contacting the American College for Advancement in Medicine.

And they have the nerve to call it "diet" soda?

It must be a diet straight out of you-know-where -- because new studies find yet again that guzzling this junk will cause your belly bulge and send you hurtling down the path towards diabetes.

But that's not CO2 in your growing gut -- that's plain old fat, and it's being fed by aspartame, the "no-calorie" sweetener used in diet soda.

In the first study, researchers looked at nearly a decade of data on 474 Texas seniors and found that those who knocked back two diet sodas a day had bellies that grew 500 percent faster than those of the non-drinkers.

That led to waistlines two inches bigger -- but it didn't take two sodas a day to have an impact: The researchers also reported at a recent American Diabetes Association conference that any diet soda at all caused waistlines to expand 70 percent faster.

In another study, researchers gave mice either a diet with added corn oil and aspartame -- something like a rodent version of a fast food meal with a diet soda -- or a diet with just the corn oil.

After three months, the aspar-mice had skyrocketing glucose levels and increased insulin resistance, turning them into furry prediabetics with frightening speed.

Think that's bad? That's positively mild compared to the other complaints associated with aspartame.

This awful sweetener has been linked to seizures, coma, brain tumors, headaches, memory loss and more -- right up to and including death itself, and I'm giving you the short version here.

For the full and uncensored story, read this.

You'll never drink diet soda again!