I is for Iodine

Our bodies need minerals. Not just for strong bones but all sorts of metabolic functions. For some reason, nature decided to use many different minerals in our design. A lack of sufficiency of any mineral in our body means that the complex dance of bio-chemical activity and its manifesting higher-level function is thwarted in some way. We may or may not feel fine as an individual but a close up view of the body may reveal objective dysfunction.

The physical body is, at one level, a composite of atomic elements. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen are the primary building blocks of all life as we know it. Mineral elements such as potassium, magnesium, sodium, calcium, phosphorous, sulfur, chloride are the major minerals used by all cells in the body. Still more minerals such as, boron, iron, zinc, copper, selenium, chromium, vanadium, molybdenum, manganese, cobalt, nickel, arsenic, & fluoride are frequently utilized as components of  enzymes and are considered trace minerals as their total quantity in the body amounts to just 0.005% of the body’s total weight or less than 4 grams. Some people think that minuscule amounts of even lesser know minerals such as yttrium, indium, germanium, iridium are necessary for full functioning.

One necessary mineral that is surrounded by contradictory information and seems to be thoroughly misunderstood is iodine. It is looked askance by thyroid endocrinologists. It is feared by those that think they have experienced an iodine allergy. Doctors a century ago used tincture of iodine as virtually a universal medicine often with near miraculous results. The iodization of salt is considered a public health mandate in many areas of the world in an attempt to prevent cretinism – a mental and physical developmental disease. Most modern people probably never give iodine a second thought content with the vague notion that we probably get enough from food or generic multi-vitamin/mineral supplements.

For most people, iodine and the thyroid gland go together. The primary thyroid hormone thyroxine contains four iodine atoms in each molecule called T4. It is synthesized in the thyroid gland and secreted into the blood stream. A small amount of T3 or tri-iodothyronine is made and released, also. From a cellular point of view, short-lived T3 is the more metabolically active hormone being formed by the action of selenium-containing enzymes. T4 is also converted to T3 in the liver, kidneys, thyroid, pituitary, central nervous system, brown fat tissue and heart vessels. T3 is basic and fundamental to all cells and has a substantial effect on many processes in the body.

Diseases of the thyroid gland are broadly classed as hypo-thyroidism (low thyroxine output) and hyper-thyroidism (excessive thyroxine output). Typically, hypothyroidism is due to an auto-immune condition known as Hashimoto’s disease. Conventional treatment uses natural or synthetic thyroid hormone to make up the deficiency without dealing with the cause. Typically, hyperthyroidism is due to a condition known as Graves’ disease. Conventional treatments include the use of goitrogens that block the thyroid’s absorption of iodine or the use of radioactive iodine to destroy thyroid function followed by lifelong hormone therapy.

The body’s daily iodine needs to make thyroid hormone are not great. A lack of iodine can cause the thyroid to swell and appear as a deformity of the neck. This is called goiter and can be treated by consuming sufficient iodine. Interestingly, a small number of unconventional doctors have had a high rate of success treating both non-goiter hyper- and hypothyroidism with iodine and certain supporting nutrients.

A much greater need for iodine seems to be for breasts, stomach mucosa, salivary glands as well as the ovaries, thymus, nerves, joints, skin, blood vessels and bones. Iodine is also a unique antioxidant, suppresses auto-immunity yet strengthens a proper functioning immune system, can act as an anti-allergenic, allows managed cell death and help to maintain a bacteria-free stomach.

To accomplish iodine sufficiency, official authorities have established a Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of 100-150 micrograms (0.10 -0.15 mg). Nursing mothers are allocated 290 micrograms. The average intake is said to be 240 micrograms which is down to half of what it was a few decades before. That may take care of the thyroid if you are ‘average’. Other tissues need more.

One has to wonder why such low levels are considered adequate when there are numerous reasons that this bare minimum could easily be problematic. If you are born with even slight mental and physical impairment it could be that your mother’s uterus or breast milk could not supply the needs of your developing body. The Japanese on average consume over 10 mg. (not micrograms) per day via their cultural diet and avoid many problems related to a lack of iodine.

Of course, everybody has heard of iodized salt. This was mandated many decades ago due to the manifestations of cretinism around the Great Lakes area due to a severe lack of iodine in the soil during an era of largely local food consumption. Other areas of the world are known as goiter belts – Nepal, parts of western China, Java and the Southern Alps. Unfortunately, treating salt with iodine has had limited success due to a number of technical and cultural reasons.

In the US, iodine used to be added to bread as a dough conditioner. One slice of bread was a significant dose of iodine. Over the last few decades a chemical with similar properties, bromine, is now added to bread. Unfortunately, bromine has no known function in the body and displaces iodine in the body. From ubiquitous sources, chlorine and fluorine enter the body and further force out the meager reserve of iodine. This halogen competition in the body conspires to lower the body’s function due to both toxicity and sub-par iodine. The consumption of popular manufactured drinks that contain bromated vegetable oil merely exacerbates an already bad situation.

The environmental release of nuclear material happens during an atomic explosion or a nuclear power plant accident. Some of that material is in the form of iodine-131 which is radioactive. If that isotope finds its way into the body, it will more than likely end up in the thyroid gland. Because this isotope continues to emit tissue-destroying radiation, the thyroid will be adversely affected. A small consolidation is that the half life of this element is only 11 days but plenty of damage can occur in a few days time if the dose is sufficient. (Half life means that only one half is left after 11 days but the other half is still radioactive. Maybe ten times the half life would be considered a ‘safe’ timeframe – three months!)

What would protect you from environmental halogens and radiation is to have plenty of iodine in your tissues. This has been shown to keep these elements from finding residence in the body. The official procedure for protection against imminent exposure to radioactive fallout is to consume 130 mg of potassium iodide per day for up to 10 days. This is about 100 mg of actual iodine per dose.

This introduction to the physiological functions of iodine just touches on the most prominent issues. Dosing oneself with extra iodine can be beneficial or problematic depending on many factors. There is a cadre of current doctors in the US that have used various iodine protocols on thousands of patients to the benefit of health. It is very cost effective. Some people can’t even take a milligram of iodine without discomfort and skin outbreaks due to toxin displacement. Others take 100 mg or more per day with only benefit.

Please further consider that in our era of fractionated knowledge, statements can have an element of truth but imply a falsehood that is not acknowledged or clarified. For instance, enough Vitamin C to prevent scurvy is probably not enough for optimal functioning of the body. Enough iodine to prevent cretinism or goiter does not necessarily mean that it is sufficient. Other factors need to be in play also. The body needs full nutrition and a supportive environment to be healthy. What is necessary for health is not determined by a ridge codification of what is right and proper but rather an understanding of healthy physiologic function and all the elements that are involved. This is complicated and even the best current understanding is limited to a degree that even the so-called experts might be hard pressed to admit. Humans have always functioned with less than full knowledge and that should not limit our willingness to move forward guided by both a rational and intuitive mind.

Branding – It’s Not Just for Cows

I have had this idea for some time that most of our collective thinking is centered around ‘brands’. Probably most of you think about a brand in reference to a consumer product or service such as KFC and Doritos or H&R Block and Metropolitan Life. A brand is just a name, a pronoun –nothing more. It does not have an inherent irrevocable meaning or quality. The Coca-Cola of today does not have the same taste as decades ago.

Think of a cattle brand. It is simply a unique identifier and has no universality. Any meaning it might have is only in the mind of its creator and was probably fanciful and not attached to a serious idea. It just identifies cows that belonged to the same collective or owner. Compared to modern product or service brands, identifying cattle was pretty straight forward.

Nowadays, everybody is frequently involved in rehashing the collective thinking. Common identifiers are used all the time – ‘the poor’, sustainable development, conservatives, etc. We all have a limited range of thoughts about any number of subjects such as some version of politics, religion, sports or some superficial groups of humans. Even thinking that you like to entertain alternative ideas is usually about as radical as drinking Dr. Pepper instead of Pepsi or Coke – just another manufactured option that isn’t quite as mainstream. Even outliers have brand options that they can adopt. True originality is rarely accepted or praised until it is shoehorned into a socially acceptable package.

The modern implementation of marketing, public relations and branding got codified by a nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward L. Bernays. His career started when he became a senior staff member of the ‘Committee of Public Information’ which was an independent agency of the US government created at the beginning of America’s involvement in WWI. Their mission was to create propaganda campaigns to generate public support for the war effort.

After the war, Bernays became a powerful figure in what became known as the field of public relations. He engineered many of the modern habits of our society, pitched products in very clever ways and was a world-renown propagandist. The use of the ‘press release’ and the cloak of ‘news’ became one of his favorite techniques to promulgate products and instilling in the public the ideas of businesses and governments.

From the book Propaganda (1928) by Bernays [downloadable via the Web]:

Chapter 1 – ORGANIZING CHAOS

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Looking critically through the past 100 years to the present does not leave much doubt about the potency of his vision or abilities or how these techniques and mindsets that have been implemented. These techniques have become standard operating procedure for business and government to make use of the media machine that now dominates our waking lives. In varying degrees we all live by the thoughts and notions given to us.

To get another broader view of Bernays’s influence and how our culture has been shaped deliberately by contrivance, consider viewing the BBC 4-part documentary series from 2002 by Adam Curtis called The Century of Self. Watch all four episodes here.

As monolithic as the propaganda machine seems to be sometimes the public players don’t always ‘get the memo’ or they choose to ignore the official version of reality for some reason. For example, consider General William Odom who was the National Security Agency Director under President Reagan:

In a major policy speech- America’s Strategic Paralysis, given in 2005 at Brown University for the Watson Institute for International Studies. “The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In a mere 18 months we went from unprecedented levels of support after 9-11..to being one of the most hated countries…Turkey used to be  one of strongest pro-US regimes, now we’re so unpopular, there’s a movie playing there- Metal Storm, about a war between US and Turkey. In addition to producing faulty intel and ties to Al Qaida, Bush made preposterous claim that toppling Saddam would open the way for liberal democracy in a very short time… Misunderstanding the character of American power, he dismissed the allies as a nuisance and failed to get the UN Security Council’s sanction…  We must reinforce international law, not reject and ridicule it.”

Odom, now a Yale professor and Hudson Institute senior fellow, was director of the sprawling NSA (which monitors all communications) from 1985-88 under Reagan, and previously was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s assistant under Carter. His latest 2004 book is America’s Inadvertent Empire.

Even if the invasion had gone well, Odom says it wouldn’t have mattered: “The invasion wasn’t in our interests, it was in Iran’s interest, Al Qaida’s interest. Seeing America invade must have made Iranian leaders ecstatic. Iran’s hostility to Saddam was hard to exaggerate.. Iraq is now open to Al Qaida, which it never was before- it’s easier for terrorists to kill Americans there than in the US..  Neither our leaders or the mainstream media recognize the perversity of key US policies now begetting outcomes they were designed to prevent… 3 years later the US is bogged down in Iraq, pretending a Constitution has been put in place, while the civil war rages, Iran meddles, and Al Qaida swells its ranks with new recruits. The US Army is stretched to the breaking point and the majority of Americans have deep doubts. We have lost our capacity to lead and are in a state of crisis- diplomatic and military.”

Odom believes in an immediate phased withdrawal. “There isn’t anything we can do by staying there longer that will make this come out better. Every day we stay in, it gets worse and the price gets higher.”

He decried the “sophomoric and silly” titled war on terrorism. “Terrorism cannot be defeated because it’s not an enemy, it’s a tactic. A war against Al Qaida is sensible and supportable, but a war against a tactic is ludicrous and hurtful… a propaganda ploy to swindle others into supporting one’s own terrorism … and encourages prejudices against Muslims everywhere. What if we said, ‘Catholic Christian IRA hitmen’? ”

“The hypocrisy is deeper than this. By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.” 

He said the fixation on spreading democracy was wrongheaded. “Holding elections is easy, creating stable constitutional orders is difficult. Only 8-9 of 50 new democracies created since the 40’s have a constitutional system. Voting only ratifies the constitutional deal that has been agreed to by elites- people or groups with enough power- that is guns and money, to violate the rules with impunity… Voting does not cause a breakthrough… One group will win out and take them off the path to a liberal breakthrough .. Spreading illiberal democracy without Constitutionalism is a very bad idea, if we care about civil liberties. We are getting that lesson again in Hamas.”

Odom called for a “great reduction in US oil consumption” and pilloried our “energy policy of no energy policy. As long as large sums of money roll into the coffers of a few Middle East states, a lot of it will leak into the hands of radical political activists. A “$2-3 a gallon tax could fund massive R+D programs for alternative fuels and generate a strong demand for greater fuel efficiency … Getting serious about nuclear power could also lessen our oil dependency.”

 “No government that believes radical terrorist groups in Middle East are serious threat to us would do any less on energy policy.”

This guy was definitely not following the talking points of officialdom. If he made a splash in the media at the time, I am sure it was rather short lived.

The uses of notional words or phrases have become placeholders for abstractions that are not part of reality. An ‘energy policy’ or ‘war of drugs’ becomes a sad joke. It is not a specific action plan. It is a manifesto or a mission statement. Exactly what it means can be defined and re-defined as necessary. Odom discredited the War on Terror concept. Dictionaries published only a few decades ago only referenced nation states as being implementers of terror not extra-national groups with agendas and tactics that are hard to pin down.

The federal law ‘The No Child Left Behind Act’ is another example. This euphemistically named law is supposedly a plan to fix diverse educational systems in the US that historically have been only under state and local control. The notion of being ‘left behind’ implies a contest or being abandoned. In fact this faux compassion hardly goes beyond a photo op. The idea of education has been corseted into a national testing program whose results allow schools to continue to get federal money if the children answer sufficient questions correctly. This is the new definition of education.

In a similar vein is ‘The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act’. It is not about anything implied by the name. The emotive words ‘protection’, ‘affordable’ and ‘health’ mean very little in the nuts and bolts of the law. How that vague bureaucratic promise will be fulfilled, we have yet to see but there is no objective reason to think that people will become healthier because of it. What is considered affordable for a person, an insurance company or the government can certainly be molded and tweaked as necessary. As for real health care where sickness is not managed in a capital-intensive fashion with mounds of requisite paperwork – that is just too farfetched to imagine given our current collective and hypnotic mindset!

Which way do you want to go? The names of these roads mean nothing. They are only brands. Where they lead you is all that matters.

Old New Year

Twenty-thirteen or two thousand thirteen is starting to unfurl. The standout part of this new year might be the ‘thirteen’ –  as in unlucky thirteen, Friday the thirteenth, Apollo thirteen, October 13, 1307 (Templers were arrested).

Some legal changes took place a hundred years ago. In 1913, the 16^th Constitutional Amendment was ratified by sufficient states to allow Congress to pass the Revenue Act of 1913 which kicked off the modern Federal Income Tax. The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress two days before Christmas in that same year. Some might consider these Acts as ‘bad luck’ as the Fed has reduced the value of the dollar to a couple of pennies in contradiction to their mandate and the Income tax has created a nightmare of paperwork, de facto subsidies and financial uncertainty for individual Americans and corporations that must pay taxes.

The changing of the year seems to bring out reminiscing and prognostication in many people. After all what is wrong with a bit of looking forward as well as looking backward to get some perspective about this moment in history? Have we already forgotten what happen during the last 360+ days? Are our collective memories that bad? If they truly are, we are in deep sneakers.

Of course, everybody thinks sometimes about the future but the notion to predict the future comes from where? Prophesying as in the Bible and other religious traditional? Or, is it just those ‘chosen individuals’ that want the attention because they pretend to know the future? And what does a real prediction look like? Is this horseshoes? Does close count? If someone ends up being ‘more accurate’ than somebody else does that make them a better prophet or just lucky? After all, instead of understanding the continuity of all past events as a predictor of the probably future, it seems like making it into a contest or creating a game is great fun!

In times past, the end of the year was thought of in a different vein. Saturnalia was the ancient Roman holiday that was celebrated around the time of the winter solstice. The god Saturn was mythologized as being the eater of child among other things. Certain versions of this celebration consisted of temporary role reversal of masters and slaves or the abandonment of certain social laws. The Greek equivalent was the god Cronus (a Titan) that was interestingly associated with social chaos and unrest although he was also said to rule over Earth during the highly moral Golden Age when laws were not needed. Chronos (different spelling) was a mythological character (not a Titan) who is associated with time and its passage.

In a certain sense the young or youth are sacrificed for the culture at large. Children are molded in many ways by the behavior of those around them – from eating habits forming their physiological development to the conditioning power of language with the expectations and coercions of constant social training. The idea that children are sovereign beings that should be allowed to express themselves as though they were fully moral beings as during the Golden Age has been typically met with fearful thoughts and aggressive behavior from parents and adults with authority. The actual physical abuse of children is the most extreme form of conditioning and probably the least efficient. The child that expresses unique high-level behavior is not embraced by the social order. Unbridled, they are often seen as a threat to ‘cultural unity’ or ‘special’ in some way. Those unusual children may be, at best, put on an isolated pedestal or kept out of the public eye. At worst, they are ostracized or institutionalized as overt threats to others or themselves.

Until we are able to treat all of society, including the children that we choose to bring into this world, with respect and as morally sovereign beings, we will not have a new year that is significantly different from the past. Technological advances, wars, new laws or governments or cosmic events are not going to change the dysfunctional nature of men’s minds. A new age will only be created by new thoughts in the minds of everyone. Something seemingly that simple could radically change our experience of being human. Dare we be different this year?