Prevention and Wellness Sites

There may be some crossover between this list and the Health Sites list accessible from the Recovery page. These are sites that are more into prevention than cure. For healthy eating we subscribe to and recommend the Nutrition Action Healthletter from the CSPI.  Prevention Magazine is an excellent source of the latest information in this field, and is often available at grocery store check-outs.

The drug companies are very powerful in their government lobbies. Particularly insiduous are their attempts to muzzle the natural health industry - the producers of vitamins, herbal remedies and minerals. This is even more worrying when you consider the huge expenditures on pharmaceuticals to treat heart diseases and cancers which might well have been prevented by long term use of anti-oxidant vitamins.

A new law being pushed in Canada in 2008 by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada's Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry. Among the changes proposed by the bill are radical alterations to key terminology, including replacing the word "drug" with "therapeutic product" throughout the Act, thereby giving the Canadian government broad-reaching powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements and other items. With this single language change, anything that is "therapeutic" automatically falls under the Food and Drug Act. This would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances. The Act also changes the definition of the word "sell" to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved "therapeutic substances." Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at Stop51.com.

Having said that, there are fraudsters out there selling snake oil. As consumers we need to be able to tell what is genuine (even if the government has not yet recognized it, and what is fraudulent. Quackwatch may help you in this dilemma.

Fitness Sites and local (Ottawa - Kanata) fitness clubs
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