Dr. Mercola discusses the facts about Splenda and why it should be avoided.

Dr. Gabor Forgacs is one of the leading experts in the world in the area of what is now called “organ printing,” where aggregates of cells for a particular organ are delivered with an ordinary (but modified) inkjet printer onto biological scaffolding gels (the “paper”).

Dr. Forgacs is a biophysicist with degrees in biology as well as advanced physics and is currently heading up a biophysics lab called Forgacslab at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research focuses on the physical mechanisms in cellular and developmental biology.

He wrote a book with Stuart A. Newman entitled The Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo in 2005, which is the first of its kind to bridge the gap between developmental biology and physics.

Dr. Mercola’s Comments

The number of people in need of organ transplants continues to rise faster than the number of available donors, and as a result, 19 people die every day due to the shortage.

As of February 10, 2010, there were over 105,600 people waiting for an organ donation in the United States. However, from January to November 2009, just over 26,000 organ transplants took place.

So it would be nothing short of miraculous if we could one day replace virtually every organ or tissue in patients’ bodies with young pristine organs, as they age or become diseased or injured.

Recently, steps toward achieving this goal have advanced greatly, thanks in part to the amazing work pioneered by Dr. Gabor Forgacs.

“Beam Me a New Lung, Scottie”

Printing tissues and organs may seem like science fiction, but it really isn’t anymore.

Ordinary inkjet printers are now being modified to deposit biological material, including human cells, in a controlled and efficient manner.

Dr. Forgacs hopes to be able to use his organ printer to eventually build full-sized, fully functional organs that can be surgically implanted in your body. These organs might not look anything like the ones you have now, but they will perform the same functions.

Of course, fully functional laboratory-grown hearts and livers are a future possibility, but that level of complexity is out of reach, for now.

Forgacs’ current focus is on tubular constructs that can be used to replace blood vessels. The rational for this is, every organ and tissue must have vascularization to survive, so this is a crucial step before more complex tissues can be created.

The tubular constructs can also be used for hemodialysis and peripheral bypass surgery, and will eventually be used in coronary bypass surgery once standards of safety are met.

Building a Better Blood Vessel

A blood vessel may not seem like a highly complex organ, but it actually involves growing three different types of cells in a multi-phased process:

1. A biopsy is taken from the patient. Ordinary skin cells are used to provide the basis for the fibroblastic layer (the outer layer of the vessel). Other cells that must be obtained are endothelial cells from the innermost part of the patient’s blood vessel, and smooth muscle cells, which provide elasticity.
2. The various cells are then grown in Petri dishes, and they create their own extracellular matrix. This matrix is an important component of every organ, making up the frame of the organ to which the other cells attach.
3. The sheet of cells is then wrapped around a Teflon tube. The cells don’t attach to the tube, but knit together around it, after which they can slide the Teflon tube out, leaving a tubular vessel.

Alternately, some companies choose to use the patient’s cells along with an artificial scaffold material, providing a synthetic extracellular matrix, instead of waiting for the cells to make their own matrix. However, this procedure has yielded less than spectacular results, apart from a few successes.

Printing Out New Nerves

One of the applications of blood vessel-type structures is nerve grafts, which Dr. Forgac’s lab is working on.

When you have a serious enough accident to sever a major nerve — in a limb for example — a laboratory-grown tube of cells can act as a bridge between the distal and proximal ends of the damaged nerve.

The human body can spontaneously regenerate gaps of 1 to 3 centimeters without any intervention, given time. However, beyond 3 centimeters, the two ends of the nerve cannot “find each other” to reconnect. A nerve bridge can help with this, and the tissues used to create the nerve bridge can be “printed” on an organ printer.

The printing process is very versatile.

Dr. Forgac has this technology up and running now, and it is just a matter of time before his team will be building sheaths of cardiac or brain tissue that can be used as patches for victims of heart attack and stroke.

Tissuing in a New Age

Eventually, as scientists master the engineering of human tissues, they will be able to build an entire kidney, or a new pancreas with islets of Langerhans-type cells that will be able to make insulin for type 1 diabetics — making insulin pumps a thing of the past.

One huge advantage of building organs in the lab from your own cells is the lack of tissue rejection. Currently, patients who receive organ transplants are usually tethered to a lifetime of strong anti-rejection medications that have damaging side effects of their own.

But the science isn’t quite there yet.

Tissue engineering is so complex that companies are focusing on one type of tissue at a time so that they can get to the point of offering a saleable product that can sustain them financially. There are about 22 tissues and organ structures in the pipelines to date. Fortunately, there is a good deal of funding available right now for this kind of research.

Two of the most impressive recent success stories are the construction and implanting of a new trachea in one patient, and a new bladder in another.

In 2009, a team of Spanish and British researchers built a tracheal segment for a young woman who had problems breathing. The tracheal segment they built was truly a marvel of bioengineering.

They began with the trachea of a cadaver, “shaking off” the cells from the extracellular matrix. Then they used the bare matrix as a frame and populated it with stem cells from the patient so that there would be no tissue rejection. It was a real breakthrough in the sense that biological material was used from two sources and put together to make a final product.

When they inserted this new tracheal segment into the woman’s respiratory tract, it was a huge success, and she is breathing normally to this day.

Anthony Atala, one of the world’s leading tissue engineers, successfully built and implanted a bladder into a woman whose bladder was unable to function properly. This is the most complex organ that has been “grown” in a lab and transferred into a patient, to date.

Atala’s company, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is also in the process of engineering a human ear.

Your Body as Bioreactor

A bioreactor is a gizmo into which you put your engineered tissue to mature, to grow into whatever form you are targeting. The bioreactor has to mimic the physiological conditions of the human body.

Machines have been developed as bioreactors. But the best bioreactor is the human body itself!

The Belgian group who built the tracheal segment did just this. They built the trachea in the lab and implanted it into the patient’s hand so that it could vascularize in the patient’s own blood supply, using her body as the bioreactor. Then once vascularized, the tracheal segment was moved into its final place — into the damaged trachea itself.

This was a monumental bioengineering feat!

Organ Replacement Has Its Limits — The Ultimate Goal is Organ Regeneration

According to the anti-aging experts, it is unlikely we are going to be able to significantly slow down the aging process (barring some unforeseen breakthroughs). So, scientists are aiming their research toward enhancing the body’s ability for tissue and organ regeneration.

According to Dr. Forgacs, tissue engineering is really turning more toward “regenerative engineering” or “regenerative medicine,” since it is unlikely they will ever be able to grow complex organs, like a heart, in the lab and just put it into you.

They are trying to understand and capitalize on your body’s own regenerative abilities.

Your body already has an amazing ability to regenerate. The following are just a few examples:

• Skin wounds and broken bones generally heal well spontaneously.
• Some organs show regenerative ability, such as your liver, which can regenerate itself even if more than 75 to 90 percent of it is removed.
• One man has been able to regenerate his severed fingertip. Surgeons applied a special extracellular matrix powder — a mixture of protein and connective tissue used to repair tendons—which signaled his body to start the process of tissue regrowth. In just four weeks, the man’s fingertip grew back completely.

Right now, scientists can implant special smart biomaterials, like this matrix, to encourage your body’s tissues rebuild themselves, but this only works for small areas — typically 1 centimeter or less. Technological advances will make it possible to not only replace entire organs, but to repair much larger areas.

And these advances are being made at increasingly impressive rates — revealing possibilities that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.

It’s very possible that 10 years from now, you will have the option of receiving a laboratory grown kidney that is capable of filtering waste from your body, completely free of the risk for rejection.

It seems that you and your children will be receiving an extension on the limited “organ warranties” you were born with, thanks to the pioneering work of bioengineers like Gabor Forgacs.

Test post on 27thAug2010 in EMF -2

Test post on 27thAug2010 in EMF

Test post on 27thAug2010 in Articles-2

Test article 1

Test post on 9thAug2010

V-test blog 1

David “Avocado” Wolfe, a leading authority on raw foods and superfoods, coaches Hollywood celebrities and leading business people on nutrition and wellness.

In this interview, David shares his extensive knowledge about the holistic treatment of chronic inflammation.

Dr. Mercola’s comments:

David “Avocado” Wolfe has been an advocate of raw food for 16 years. He is a world authority on raw foods and superfoods who coaches Hollywood celebrities and business people on nutrition and wellness.

A field researcher in the most literal sense, David studies and conducts his research while traveling all over the world.

“I have been into the Amazon, into the jungles of Costa Rica, into the jungles of Mexico, into the jungles of Indonesia, all through Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, all over …” David says.

A good portion of the information on nutrition, some of which we will discuss in this interview, is actively being suppressed by multibillion dollar industries that do not want you to know the truth. They seek to discredit much of it because they want you to opt for their expensive drug solutions instead, which nearly always come with potentially toxic side effects.

But David and I are here to tell you that there are natural options to almost every health problem or condition you’ll ever face.

One of the primary components of many disease processes is chronic inflammation.

The conventional approach to treat inflammation typically involves taking some type of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, like Vioxx — which was taken off the market years ago, but only after it had killed more than 60,000 people.

These drugs do absolutely nothing to treat the cause of the inflammation in your body, AND may deteriorate your health even further as most of them have side effects and cause additional health problems, some of which are potentially lethal.

The Self-Healing Revolution

David was originally deeply embedded in the traditional medical system, growing up as the son of two medical doctors.

“When I was very, very young, my Mom always told me, “If you lose your health, you’ve lost everything you’ve got. You’ve got to maintain your health no matter what,” David says.

“I began to see that eating oranges straight off a tree and walking around barefoot when I was a kid, really made me feel good.”

That self-discovery activated his search for knowledge.

“I literally spent the last 22 year of my life on the cutting edge of what is possible via supplements, herbalism, food, superfoods, right positive thinking, etcetera,” David says.

Many people still do not realize that one of the leading causes of death in the US is the conventional medical system.

This fact is in large part invisible, because when a person dies from a heart attack caused by a drug, such as Vioxx, that death is not attributed to that drug. It’s simply listed as “a heart attack.”

Those who are paying closer attention are beginning to see this truth however, and are also beginning to realize that the answer to their health problems is not drugs, but lifestyle. If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are you are in this category.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to realize that most of the health problems and diseases you may encounter in your life can be treated and overcome without resorting to synthetic drugs.

In this interview, David tells the story of how he healed himself from chronic pain using yoga – despite the fact that all of his doctors, chiropractors, and osteopaths told him he had a mechanical problem in his spine that was causing chronic inflammation and pain.

“I completely healed myself using natural approaches,” David says.

“I can do everything today. So, in spite of the sincere opinions of very qualified health professionals, I still was able to go beyond the information I was getting, and actually heal myself. And I want to put that out there for everybody.

You may get sincere advice. But, it may be sincerely wrong advice.

Be open. Be aware that solutions are out there.”

Most physicians are well-intentioned and truly believe that they’re doing what’s appropriate, and it’s what they use for themselves and their family. The sad reality is that most of them have not done independent, objective research to find alternatives that work based on natural principles.

When was the Last Time You Walked Barefoot?

“I want to start off by talking about the barefoot revolution,” David says.

“If there is a local park or a beach nearby where you can easily get your shoes off and take a walk, this is really powerful in terms of helping you deal with inflammation of your ankles, knees, hips, and, I would say, even lower back.

A lot of back problems, a lot of postural problems, are caused by wearing shoes that throw out our posture in different directions, and they also make your toes limp. Your toes lose their ability to grip. They lose their strength by the wearing of shoes.”

Most shoes emulate a cast in that they do not allow your foot to articulate properly.

In terms of inflammation, shoes also block the beneficial electromagnetic radiation of the earth, which actually has an anti-inflammatory effect. According to David, about 30 studies performed by Clint Ober over the past 12 years reveal this.

“The studies indicate we can just touch the earth with our bare feet or our bare skin; sit down on the grass, and the earth actually releases anti-inflammatory electromagnetic radiation,” David says. “This helps to draw out inflammation, in particular of your lower extremities: your feet, our ankles, knees, and hips.”

My own understanding of this phenomenon is that it’s not caused so much by the electromagnetic radiation but rather from the transfer of free electrons from the earth; a grounding effect that is, in my understanding, one of the most potent antioxidants we know of.

Unfortunately, few people ever walk barefoot anymore to experience it.

According to David, it takes about 80 minutes for the free electrons from the earth to reach your blood stream and transform your blood.

“This is what Clint’s research has been showing,” David says.

“We actually did this at the Longevity Conference. We showed, within an hour and 20 minutes, how people’s blood profiles changed and improved just based on being grounded for an hour and 20 minutes.”

Walking barefoot can also help ameliorate the constant irritation caused by EMFs and other types of radiation on your system from cell phones, computers and Wi-Fi on your system. By getting outside, barefoot, touching the earth, and allowing the excess charge in your body to discharge into the earth, you can alleviate some of the stress put on your system.

That is the grounding effect.

Walking barefoot outside and breathing fresh air are grossly neglected foundational health principles, as is having large amounts of your skin exposed to natural sunlight so you can optimize your vitamin D, which is another crucial component for treating inflammation.

Powerful Anti-Inflammatory Supplements

There are also several powerful anti-inflammatory supplements that can have immediate use. Here are a few of David’s favorites:

MSM (methylsulfonylmethane) – Its ability to neutralize inflammation is one of the greatest, and one of the most inexpensive, discoveries in this field.

MSM has been shown to break down the calcification that is frequently associated with chronic inflammation. In your arteries, it’s called plaque, which leads to heart disease. These plaques are the root cause of inflammation.

“MSM helps dissolve these calcified deposits, turning it into calcium sulfate and making it soluble so your body can excrete it,” David explains.

“The dosage of MSM has to be, in the beginning, maybe 2,500 mg per day. But really, you need to get up to 5,000 mg or 7,500 mg, and allow it to work over a period of months.

But don’t ever want to start anything at a very high dosage. Move into it gently.

I have a good friend of mine who is now taking 30,000 mg of MSM for his rheumatoid arthritis, and that is the dosage he needs in order to feel complete relief of his pain.”

Keep in mind that there may be side effects because MSM can detoxify you, and that may initially aggravate any condition you have. So increase dosage slowly to allow your body to adjust.

It’s also important to note that if you’re allergic to sulfa drugs, you may also have trouble with MSM because it is a type of sulfur.

MSM is not a drug however. It is a natural compound that exists in all trees and many plants. MSM is highly concentrated in aloe vera, for example, so you can also use natural aloe vera products that contain MSM in its natural form.

As with most supplements, quality is a concern when it comes to MSM as well. David recommends using wood pulp or tree-derived MSM.

Vitamin C — A tremendous antioxidant, vitamin C is also anti-inflammatory, and is vital for rebuilding collagen and connective tissue. David recommends taking your MSM and vitamin C together if possible. Your best bet is to use a natural plant-based or botanical vitamin C supplement, such as acerola cherry, rosehip, or camu berry.

Keep in mind that high doses of vitamin C can cause diarrhea, so again, you’ll want to start slowly and work your way up to about 3,000 mg per day. Certain newer supplements also use liposomal delivery systems that can increase their bioavailability.

Medicinal mushrooms – These include reishi mushrooms, cordyceps, Agaricus blazei and chaga mushrooms. According to David, medicinal mushrooms can help boost your immune system to break up longstanding infections.

There are also mushroom products available as powders that you can add to smoothies, protein shakes, tea and other beverages.

Mangosteen – Organic mangosteen rind is another superior antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties. The rind of mangosteen has been used in traditional medicinal systems in Southeast Asia, all the way into Indonesia, since the beginning of recorded history.

Interestingly, it specifically treats the pain and inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis.

I have personally treated thousands of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, so this is an area I have a lot of experience with. Nearly all patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis are deficient in vitamin D, so optimizing your vitamin D levels is also an essential part of treating this condition.

In addition, rheumatoid arthritis nearly always has an emotional component. Addressing and resolving these emotional wounds is therefore another vital part of the process.

In my experience, energy psychology tools such as the Meridian Tapping Technique/ Emotional Freedom Technique is one of the most effective strategies to address this underlying emotional component, and will work synergistically with herbal- or supplemental therapies.

Sometimes, unless you address the basics, such as your emotions, the herbs and vitamins won’t do much good. But once you include such simple basics as getting regular sun exposure and addressing your emotions, in addition to whatever supplements you choose, you can at times end up with what appears to be a miracle.

Astaxanthin – A seafood component extracted from algae, astaxanthin provides three unusual health benefits:

1. Preventing sunburn (4mg dose)
2. Eliminating cataracts and age-related macular degeneration
3. Protection against radiation damage when flying in an airplane

It’s a bit pricey, but can be extremely effective. A less expensive alternative is krill oil, which also contains astaxanthin, in addition to essential omega-3 fats such as eicosapentanoic acid (EPA) and docosahexanoic acid (DHA).

Cooling Inflammatory Conditions with Raw Foods

“Inflammation, of course, is “in flame” or “on fire,”” David explains, and there are also a large number of raw foods that can help “cool” the inflammatory response.

“One of my favorite tools to do that is vegetable juicing, particularly celery and cucumber juices.  

Celery is very rich in electrolytes. It has a cooling effect on your body, which is really an anti-inflammatory effect. Cucumber does as well.

A simple juice is celery and cucumber. There is no sugar and it’s an instant ‘turn-on’ for energy. It also has an instant drawing effect of toxins out of your system due to the chlorophyll present in the celery.”

Fennel is another cooling plant suitable for juicing. Fennel juice is specifically implicated for headaches and migraines.

Dill is related to fennel, and both are very beneficial for producing breast milk in nursing women.

More Must-Hear Information!

For even more information, I highly recommend you listen to this interview in its entirety, or read through the accompanying transcript as David is an absolute treasure trove of information.

Other in-depth discussions in this interview include:

• The difference between prostaglandin 2 versus prostaglandin 1 and 3 – these biochemical modulators can either aggravate or ameliorate inflammation, which is why it’s so important to choose the right oils when cooking
• The dangers of food irradiation
• The concept of “raw water,” the nature of hydrogen and how it dissolves bad calcium, and why alkalizers and water ionizers may do more harm than good
• The benefits of gammalinolenic acid products (GLA), such as hempseed and spirulina

I am convinced, as is David, that nearly every health problem you face can be addressed using safe, natural, non-toxic strategies. So keep educating yourself to take control of your, and your family’s, health!