So what are the alternative internet access choices? Is there anyway Netflix (or smaller companies) can deliver digital content to you other than through the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon?

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-78901229/

DAMIAN DOVARGANES, ASSOCIATED PRESS

A federal appeals court swept aside government regulations designed to ensure equal access to the Internet, raising the prospects of higher fees for consumers and more barriers for start-ups seeking to compete online.

The decision Tuesday could allow AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and other Internet service providers to charge the likes of Netflix and YouTube more money to deliver movies and video to their customers.

The ruling also throws into disarray the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to limit telecom and cable firms from discriminating against certain Internet traffic by slowing speeds, impeding access or raising fees.

The issue, known by the wonky term “net neutrality,” involves complex technical and policy rules. But at its core, the concept comes down to a classic debate about how far government could and should go to ensure a level digital playing field.

“There is the potential for the world to change substantially” in terms of how the Internet is run, said Jeffrey Eisenach, director of the Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute think thank. “This is a big deal.”

The FCC, which long has made net neutrality a top priority, faces once again a tricky calculation about how to balance the need for consumer and small-business protections against a desire to let the free market run its course.

“I am committed to maintaining our networks as engines for economic growth, test beds for innovative services and products, and channels for all forms of speech protected by the 1st Amendment,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said.

The agency will consider appealing the decision or taking other options, he said, “to ensure that these networks on which the Internet depends continue to provide a free and open platform for innovation and expression and operate in the interest of all Americans.”

In the short term, the ruling left big telecom companies, small businesses, government agencies and consumers scrambling to understand its effect and making their cases about how they believe the FCC should proceed.

The fear among net neutrality supporters is that absent strong regulations requiring service providers to treat all traffic equally, the Internet eventually becomes a realm of digital haves and have-nots.

Telecom companies could let big Internet companies with deep pockets pay for fast lanes on the Internet and pass those costs on to their customers, while other online companies are stuck at slower speeds.

Or they could block access to certain apps or Web services that compete with their own. Or they could levy extra charges on consumers who spend more time streaming or downloading big files over the Internet.

The telecom and cable industry has fought net neutrality rules repeatedly over the years. The carriers said that building and maintaining the infrastructure that runs the Internet were costly. As such, they needed flexibility in the way they charged for those services to recoup their investment and continue to improve services.

Despite the ruling, Verizon, which filed the court challenge, and Comcast Corp. said they would continue to support an open Internet. Comcast is obligated to follow open Internet rules into 2018 as part of a settlement it signed when it acquired NBC Universal in 2011.

Verizon also reiterated its commitment to keeping the Internet open, but it said the ruling would allow for improvements.

“Today’s decision will not change consumers’ ability to access and use the Internet as they do now,” the company said. “The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the Internet.”

Last week, AT&T disclosed a new plan it called Sponsored Data that would charge Netflix, YouTube and other content providers more money to allow AT&T mobile customers to stream movies and videos without exceeding data limits. The company insisted the plan did not violate net neutrality rules.

Tuesday’s ruling will open the door to more of those types of sponsorship deals, said David Kaut, an analyst at the investment firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stems from the FCC’s latest attempt to thread that needle between free market and consumer advocates with its open Internet regulations.

The 2010 rules were designed to force telecom and cable companies to treat all online traffic equally. The agency had been forced to revisit the issue at that time after losing an earlier high-profile net neutrality case to Comcast.

Entrepreneurs insist that a level digital playing field is essential to guaranteeing that the next generation of entrepreneurs has a shot at unseating giants such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

Lee Olds, a 53-year-old retired software developer, said losing net neutrality means it is less likely for small companies to disrupt established business models in the way that Twitter Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. were able to do.

“If a company wants to do something like that, they’ll have to be affiliated with somebody who is providing access to the houses, like one of the big cable companies,” he said.

Democrats and Republicans, who have been fighting over Internet access rules for nearly a decade, seized on the latest ruling to bolster their cases.

Democrats, including President Obama, said that the FCC needed to step in with clear rules preventing broadband providers from charging some companies higher prices to carry their content — or even worse, from blocking it — and that those rules would keep the Internet open for innovation by small entrepreneurs.

Republicans argued that there had been no widespread abuses. They said network neutrality rules were a regulatory solution in search of a problem and could squelch innovation by opening the door to more regulation.

Besides appealing the case, which many legal observers said was unlikely, the FCC could take a wait-and-see approach to track whether carriers make any changes that harm consumers or start-ups. That could result in a backlash, which might lead to more popular and political support for tougher rules.

Consumer advocates hope the FCC also will reconsider reclassifying Internet service providers as Title II common-carrier services, like telephone companies, rather than keep them classified as information services. In its ruling, the court said the FCC exceeded its authority because of the way these companies were classified.

If the FCC were to reclassify Internet providers, they argued, it would be able to apply the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules that were struck down Tuesday without fear of being invalidated again.

“There’s no legal challenge — there’s a political challenge” to that strategy, said Michael Weinberg, acting co-president of Public Knowledge, an open Internet advocacy organization. “Internet service providers are strongly against Title II regulation, and members of Congress have spoken out against Title II regulation.”

Khalil Brown, a 20-year-old information technology student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said he didn’t think Internet providers should be able to pick winners and losers based on what content company gets preferential treatment.

“You can get into a situation where someone like Verizon has a disagreement with Netflix, for instance,” he said. “They could theoretically throttle Netflix’s services and that would be a big issue.”

chris.obrien

jim.puzzanghera

salvador.rodriguez

O’Brien reported from San Francisco, Puzzanghera from Washington and Rodriguez from Los Angeles.

This is going to put the little excel based Monte Carlo simulation I teach to shame.

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_finance.shtml

Challenges in the finance industry

Financial services firms face some of the most complex information challenges in business today. The amount of information available to support decision making is staggering. Reuters publishes 9000 pages of financial news every day. Wall Street analysts produce five research documents every minute. Financial services professionals receive hundreds of e-mails a day. And these firms have access to data about millions of transactions.

IBM is partnering with financial institutions to teach Watson the business of retail and institutional banking. The ability to consume vast amounts of information to identify patterns and make informed hypotheses naturally make Watson an excellent solution to help make informed decisions about investment choices, trading patterns and risk management.

Watson is being designed as the ultimate financial services assistant, capable of performing deep content analysis and evidence-based reasoning to accelerate and improve decisions, reduce operational costs, and optimize outcomes.

In a bank, an advisor can use Watson to make better recommendations for financial products to customers based on comprehensive analysis of market conditions, the client’s past decisions, recent life events, and available offerings.

The ability to take context into account during the hypothesis generation and scoring phases of the processing pipeline allows Watson to address these complex financial services problems and assist financial services professionals in making better decisions.

In addition, how many phones last more than a year or two? In particular, batteries? For the record, I took T-mobile up on their offer to pay early termination fees and switched from Verizon this week. My 1 year old droid razr maxx was in need of replacement anyway.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/10/ripoff_nation_how_verizon_and_att_stacked_the_deck_against_cell_phone_users_partner/

Ripoff nation: How Verizon and AT&T stacked the deck against cell phone users

Friday, Jan 10, 2014 2:24 PM UTC

Heads they win. Tails you lose.

Lynn Stuart Parramore, Alternet

Topics: AlterNet, verizon, AT&T, Cell-phones, mobile devices, T-Mobile, Sprint, Technology News, Business News

(Credit: AP)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

If you live in America, there’s a good chance you’ve not been overjoyed by your wireless plan. Simply by using a device essential to your daily life, you have been screwed. Let us count the ways.

If you overestimate how many voice minutes, text messages and data usage you need, you get screwed. If you underestimate, you also get screwed. If you have a contract, you get screwed if the service ends up being bad. If you don’t have a contract, you may find that a company can suddenly raise prices, and so you may get screwed there, too. Studying your bill often reveals still more ways you have been screwed. Did someone with a foreign number text you? Unlucky you! Did you download a ringtone thinking it was free? Oops! You’re screwed. Your bill is a maze of fees: activation fees, upgrade fees, early-termination fees, 411 fees, mysterious third-party fees, fees no one can understand. Customer service is mostly a joke.

Why is this happening to you? Because of a game called Oligopoly.

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Does Oligopoly sound familiar? Remind you of another game you used to play called Monopoly? You’ve got it. Oligopoly is its first cousin.

An oligopoly is a market dominated not by one, but by a small number of players. Because the number of players is so small, serious price competition doesn’t happen very much. Instead oligopolists tend to do sneaky things like put their heads together to figure out ways to raise prices, protect their turf, and limit consumer choices. They typically deploy armies of lobbyists to accomplish these goals. Some of these lobbyists go on to careers as regulators or vice versa (more on that in a moment).

The market for wireless providers is a classic case of oligopoly, currently dominated by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, with T-Mobile bringing up the rear. In recent years, the number of players in the carrier market has shrunk, with the size of individual players increasing through mergers and acquisitions. Last year, AT&T gobbled up Leap Wireless, T-Mobile swallowed MetrocPCS and Japan’s Softbank bought Sprint.

When you get down to it, the wireless market is really a duopoly between AT&T and Verizon, which have about two-thirds of the market between them. They are the big boys, with Sprint and T-Mobile considered the challengers.

A rather disturbing article that all should be aware of. Tax cuts that benefited the wealthy in Kansas came at the expense of public school funding. The governor and his crew are doing everything in their power to keep the tax breaks for the wealthy and underfunding public education. Is something like this happening in your state?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/opinion/whats-the-matter-with-kansas-schools.html?_r=0&referrer=

What’s the Matter With Kansas’ Schools?

KANSAS, like every state, explicitly guarantees a free public education in its Constitution, affirming America’s founding belief that only an educated citizenry can preserve democracy and safeguard individual liberty and freedom.

And yet in recent years Kansas has become the epicenter of a new battle over the states’ obligation to adequately fund public education. Even though the state Constitution requires that it make “suitable provision” for financing public education, Gov. Sam Brownback and the Republican-led Legislature have made draconian cuts in school spending, leading to a lawsuit that now sits before the state Supreme Court.

The outcome of that decision could resonate nationwide. Forty-five states have had lawsuits challenging the failure of governors and legislators to provide essential resources for a constitutional education. Litigation is pending against 11 states that allegedly provide inadequate and unfair school funding, including New York, Florida, Texas and California.

Many of these lawsuits successfully forced elected officials to increase school funding overall and to deliver more resources to poor students and those with special needs. If the Kansas Supreme Court rules otherwise, students in those states may begin to see the tide of education cuts return.

Kansas’ current constitutional crisis has its genesis in a series of cuts to school funding that began in 2009. The cuts were accelerated by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.

Overall, the Legislature slashed public education funding to 16.5 percent below the 2008 level, triggering significant program reductions in schools across the state. Class sizes have increased, teachers and staff members have been laid off, and essential services for at-risk students were eliminated, even as the state implemented higher academic standards for college and career readiness.

Parents filed a lawsuit in the Kansas courts to challenge the cuts. In Gannon v. State of Kansas, a three-judge trial court ruled in January 2013 for the parents, finding that the cuts reduced per-pupil expenditures far below a level “suitable” to educate all children under Kansas’ standards.

The judges also found that the Legislature was not meeting even the basic funding amounts set in its own education cost studies. The judges called the school funding cut “destructive of our children’s future.”

To remedy the funding shortfall, the judges ordered that per-pupil expenditures be increased to $4,492 from $3,838, the level previously established as suitable.

Rather than comply, Governor Brownback appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court. A decision is expected this month.

A victory for the parents would be heartening, but if it comes, would Governor Brownback and legislative leaders uphold the right to education guaranteed to Kansas school children?

The signals thus far are not promising. If the Kansas Supreme Court orders restoration of the funding, legislators are threatening to amend the state’s Constitution by removing the requirement for “suitable” school funding and to strip Kansas courts of jurisdiction to hear school finance cases altogether. And if the amendment fails, they have vowed to defy any court order for increased funding or, at the very least, take the money from higher education.

A court-stripping constitutional amendment, and defiance of a state Supreme Court order, would shred the very fabric of Kansas’ government and send shock waves through state capitals across the nation. It would allow elected branches to avoid any responsibility to adhere to the language and interpretation of their state constitutions by the courts. It would gravely undermine judicial independence and shut the courthouse door to vulnerable children who, as a last resort, seek legal redress to vindicate their fundamental right to an education.

As the Gannon trial judges noted, matters such as education are placed in constitutions because they are “intended for permanence” and “to protect them from the vagaries of politics.”

Kansans rightfully take pride in their strong public school system. But as Kansas goes, so may go the nation. The Kansas Constitution, like those in other states, demands that every child be given the educational opportunity to meet his or her promise. This requires, at a minimum, adequate and suitable school funding. Governor Brownback and legislators must meet the constitutional command and, by so doing, advance the core American value of equal opportunity for all.

David Sciarra is the executive director of the Education Law Center. Wade Henderson is the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

• People are corporations too! Corporations deduct expenses from their taxable income. Why not allow people to deduct commute expenses from their taxable income? I agree with the author that incentives should be higher for mass transit that car drivers. But until then accept the tax benefit!

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/12/congress-about-give-drivers-big-perk-over-transit-riders-again/7980/

Congress Is About to Give Car Commuters a Big Perk Over Transit Riders … Again

The federal commuter tax benefit is an obscure subsidy most Americans have likely never even heard of. But it’s a simple illustration of the many subtle ways that official policy in the U.S. incentivizes private car travel over mass transit.

The benefit allows employees to devote a pre-tax chunk of their income to commuting costs, like parking garage fees or mass transit passes. Traditionally, though, the benefit has been nearly twice as generous for drivers as transit riders. In 2008, for example, transit riders were allowed to set aside $115 a month; car drivers (and their employers) could forgo paying taxes on up to $220 in income each month.

The 2009 federal stimulus package finally equalized the two benefits at the higher rate. But transit advocates have continued to fight over the benefit precisely because the higher transit subsidy keeps expiring – as it is set to do again on January 1. Come Wednesday, if you ride the subway or bus to work every day, your benefit will drop from $245 to $130 a month. If you drive to work, your benefit will actually inch up from $245 to $250.

The difference has practical implications beyond the principle involved here: Local agencies like the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority have suggested that ridership (and revenue) drops when this subsidy does. And commuters will be particularly affected in cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Miami, where a large share of workers get to work every day by transit.

So what’s Congress’ problem this time around? It never got around to extending the transit benefit in 2013. Congress may still do so in the coming year, but that could take months. And, in the meantime, the federal government will go back to disproportionately subsidizing people who drive to work.

There’s a valid argument to be made that the government – and taxpayers at large – shouldn’t subsidize any commutes, whether people get to work by car, by bus, by train, or by boat. But while the government continues to specifically subsidize parking (even as it battles traffic congestion on other fronts), it’s illogical not to offer an equal benefit to commuters who take cars off the road. If anything, we should be talking about how to bring bike commuters into this equation, not how to keep mass transit riders there.

Top image: Flickr user Beraldo Leal

• A reminder that housing bubbles are not unique to the United States. The root cause in Spain may be the same root cause in the U.S. articulated by Robert Reich in “Aftershock”: wages of the middle class not keeping up with those of the upper class (see The Cadence of Finance for a couple examples as to why).
• Banks offer 100% financing so people can buy homes they really can’t afford (not commensurate with the income and wealth of the homeowner).
• After a little while the homeowners can’t pay the mortgage they could not afford in the first place.
• Banks evict the homeowners and repossess the homes. In Spain the evicted homeowner is still liable for the entire mortgage debt.
• Then, as the losses mount for the banks they are bailed out by the government with tax dollars contributed by those who were just evicted (among others).
• Big picture: banks never should have extended such loans (borrowers shouldn’t have taken them out either), those borrowers pay taxes that bailout those banks, those banks evict the homeowners, the now non-homeowners are still held liable for a loan on a home they no longer own, and eventually the bank will sell the home and retain the proceeds.
• Perhaps the Spaniards should follow the ‘ol “If you can’t beat them, join them” and seek employment at banks?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/12/29/spain-squatters/3650665/

Spain squatters take over buildings after foreclosures

BARCELONA — In this quiet suburb, children giggle as they kick around a soccer ball in front of their building. Their mothers trade tales nearby, their loud voices filling the entrance.

A father darts around the kids as he heads out to run a few errands.

It could be any Saturday afternoon anywhere in Spain except for some important differences. Homemade signs, calling for human rights and affordable housing, hang from every floor of this building. The elevator has never been operational. The water supply fails constantly.

The apartment building, with its gleaming faucets and brand-new hardwood floors, is home to 15 families who have been squatting here illegally for months.

Known as Bloc Salt, the squatters’ home is one of many created because of the hundreds of Spanish families who are served eviction notices daily and the thousands of properties that sit abandoned across the country since the Spanish housing bubble burst.

“In this country, we have people without houses and houses without people,” says Marta Afuera Pons of the Mortgage Victims’ Platform (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca). It only makes sense, she says, to start using one problem to solve the other.

One in four Spaniards is out of work, which in a country that boasts one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world means many families fall behind on their mortgage payments and face foreclosure.

At the same time, the number of empty buildings across the country swelled after a building boom went bust.

The Spanish government estimates that there are more than 650,000 finished properties that sit empty across the country, alongside nearly half a million properties that were left idle while under construction.

Bloc Salt has become the poster child of a national campaign to fill Spain’s empty homes with evicted families. The building’s five floors are home to 37 people — 17 of them children — who call each other by their first names, share meals and raise chickens in the building’s front yard.

Pons’ group has helped more than 800 homeless Spaniards move illegally into 15 buildings across the country. In the town of Salt, northeast of Barcelona, this newly built building sat empty for three years before the Mortgage Victims’ Platform began filling it with families in March.

In her large, sparsely furnished apartment on the fourth floor, Bouchra Zannouti carefully washes an apple for her 7-year-old son. Soft-spoken and shy, she proudly points out a large chest of drawers donated to her by neighbors. After being evicted twice in the past eight years, this is one of the few possessions the family owns.

Her husband moved to Spain from Morocco 14 years ago, lured by job opportunities in Spain’s booming construction sector. When the boom faltered, her husband could not find work.

The family fell behind on its mortgage payments and was eventually evicted.

In Spain, a century-old law stipulates that homeowners are on the hook for their mortgage even after the bank has repossessed the property. Zannouti and her husband were left with nowhere to live and $68,000 in debt.

“We had no stability. Every day brought a different challenge,” says Zannouti, struggling to speak as she fights back tears.

She and her husband found out about Bloc Salt around the same time they found out she was pregnant. “If we hadn’t found this place, I don’t know what we would have done.”

Life here comes with its own challenges. There’s no hot water or heating. The building, despite being brand-new and meticulously cared for by the families, has problems with mold, clogged pipes and ever-spreading cracks in the walls.

Residents are trying to negotiate with the building’s owner, offering to pay a small amount of rent in exchange for letting them stay in the building until it is sold. Their requests have gone unanswered, and the threat of being thrown out looms every day.

Zannouti and her husband debated leaving, she says, but decided to stay.

“It’s worth it,” she says. “I’ve learned so much about how to defend my rights. And my son, he has so many friends in the building. We’re proud to live here.”

More than 150,000 families in Spain have lost their homes in the past five years, according to AFES, an association that counsels Spaniards facing eviction.

“In 2007, there was more construction in Madrid alone than in Germany, France and Britain put together,” says Carlos Baños, AFES president.

Demand for these properties was plentiful, he says, thanks to easily accessible credit.

“In Spain, practically anybody could get a mortgage,” Baños says. “Somebody who had just started working could get 100% financing from the bank to buy a house.”

Though many are optimistic about the Spanish economy’s return to growth after more than two years of recession, Baños worries it’s not enough to halt the growing number of mortgage defaulters.

“Unemployment continues to rise,” he says, predicting that even more Spaniards will face eviction in the coming years. “We’re seeing people who have spent their entire savings trying to fend off eviction. There comes a point when they simply can’t pay anymore.”

The Mortgage Victims’ Platform — the group behind the occupied building in Salt — has been pushing the government to do more.

In February, the group gathered 1.4 million signatures on a petition asking parliament to consider allowing homeowners to walk away from their debts once their home was repossessed. The government did make it easier for the poorest families to cancel their debts but refused to extend the law to include everyone.

Last month, the discussion about evictions in Spain made it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. SAREB, the owners of Bloc Salt, had successfully argued in a Spanish court to kick the families out of the building. The families appealed to the EU court, which suspended the order until the local government could guarantee the families an alternative place to live.

“We’ve shown that the system isn’t working and that housing is a right,” Pons says. “That’s tremendous. Whatever happens to this place, we’ve already won.”

The victory comes at a steep price for taxpayers, says Francisco González of SAREB, a quasi-government bank that buys toxic real estate holdings from Spain’s troubled banks.

González estimates the occupation of the building has cost Spanish taxpayers millions of dollars.

“We bought this building with taxpayers’ money, and we can’t pay them back until it’s sold. But until they’re kicked out, we can’t even start to sell it,” he says.

SAREB has about 50,000 housing units to sell, he says, but the easiest to sell are those that are complete and ready to live in, such as Bloc Salt.

“They’re illegally occupying the building. It’s a crime,” he says.

Grandmother Doris Pérez smiles at the thought of being called a criminal. Having lost her home, she has lived in Bloc Salt since March with her 18-year-old daughter and two grandchildren, ages 11 and 8 years old.

“I used to wake up exhausted. But things have changed.” She feels like she’s part of a community, one that’s fighting to change the system that wronged her, she says.

As she reflects on the roller-coaster ride that has been the past few years of her life, she grows quiet.

“I lost my house. I lost my husband,” she says. She pauses as she looks around the room and smiles. “But I’ve much gained more.”

So a healthy diet and regular exercise is better than buying weight loss and muscle building supplements? Of course. Also, there are recent studies ( http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20131216/experts-dont-waste-your-money-on-multivitamins ) that conclude multivitamins are a waste of money.

May this information help in your New Year’s resolution formation.

In the pursuit of understanding…
-DjM-

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied-to-dietary-aids.html?_r=1&

Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids

When Christopher Herrera, 17, walked into the emergency room at Texas Children’s Hospital one morning last year, his chest, face and eyes were bright yellow — “almost highlighter yellow,” recalled Dr. Shreena S. Patel, the pediatric resident who treated him.

Christopher, a high school student from Katy, Tex., suffered severe liver damage after using a concentrated green tea extract he bought at a nutrition store as a “fat burning” supplement. The damage was so extensive that he was put on the waiting list for a liver transplant.

“It was terrifying,” he said in an interview. “They kept telling me they had the best surgeons, and they were trying to comfort me. But they were saying that I needed a new liver and that my body could reject it.”

New data suggests that his is not an isolated case. Dietary supplements account for nearly 20 percent of drug-related liver injuries that turn up in hospitals, up from 7 percent a decade ago, according to an analysis by a national network of liver specialists. The research included only the most severe cases of liver damage referred to a representative group of hospitals around the country, and the investigators said they were undercounting the actual number of cases.

While many patients recover once they stop taking the supplements and receive treatment, a few require liver transplants or die because of liver failure. Naïve teenagers are not the only consumers at risk, the researchers said. Many are middle-aged women who turn to dietary supplements that promise to burn fat or speed up weight loss.

“It’s really the Wild West,” said Dr. Herbert L. Bonkovsky, the director of the liver, digestive and metabolic disorders laboratory at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, N.C. “When people buy these dietary supplements, it’s anybody’s guess as to what they’re getting.”

Though doctors were able to save his liver, Christopher can no longer play sports, spend much time outdoors or exert himself, lest he strain the organ. He must make monthly visits to a doctor to assess his liver function.

Americans spend an estimated $32 billion on dietary supplements every year, attracted by unproven claims that various pills and powders will help them lose weight, build muscle and fight off everything from colds to chronic illnesses. About half of Americans use dietary supplements, and most of them take more than one product at a time.

Dr. Victor Navarro, the chairman of the hepatology division at Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia, said that while liver injuries linked to supplements were alarming, he believed that a majority of supplements were generally safe. Most of the liver injuries tracked by a network of medical officials are caused by prescription drugs used to treat things like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, he said.

But the supplement business is largely unregulated. In recent years, critics of the industry have called for measures that would force companies to prove that their products are safe, genuine and made in accordance with strict manufacturing standards before they reach the market.

But a federal law enacted in 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, prevents the Food and Drug Administration from approving or evaluating most supplements before they are sold. Usually the agency must wait until consumers are harmed before officials can remove products from stores. Because the supplement industry operates on the honor system, studies show, the market has been flooded with products that are adulterated, mislabeled or packaged in dosages that have not been studied for safety.

The new research found that many of the products implicated in liver injuries were bodybuilding supplements spiked with unlisted steroids, and herbal pills and powders promising to increase energy and help consumers lose weight.

“There unfortunately are criminals that feel it’s a business opportunity to spike some products and sell them as dietary supplements,” said Duffy MacKay, a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group. “It’s the fringe of the industry, but as you can see, it is affecting some consumers.” More popular supplements like vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fish oil had not been linked to “patterns of adverse effects,” he said.

The F.D.A. estimates that 70 percent of dietary supplement companies are not following basic quality control standards that would help prevent adulteration of their products. Of about 55,000 supplements that are sold in the United States, only 170 — about 0.3 percent — have been studied closely enough to determine their common side effects, said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an expert on dietary supplements.

“When a product is regulated, you know the benefits and the risks and you can make an informed decision about whether or not to take it,” he said. “With supplements, you don’t have efficacy data and you don’t have safety data, so it’s just a black box.”

Since 2008, the F.D.A. has been taking action against companies whose supplements are found to contain prescription drugs and controlled substances, said Daniel Fabricant, the director of the division of dietary supplement programs in the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. For example, the agency recently took steps to remove one “fat burning” product from shelves, OxyElite Pro, that was linked to one death and dozens of cases of hepatitis and liver injury in Hawaii and other states.

The new research, presented last month at a conference in Washington, was produced by the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, which was established by the National Institutes of Health to track patients who suffer liver damage from certain drugs and alternative medicines. It includes doctors at eight major hospitals throughout the country.

The investigators looked at 845 patients with severe, drug-induced liver damage who were treated at hospitals in the network from 2004 to 2012. It focused only on cases where the investigators ruled out other causes and blamed a drug or a supplement with a high degree of certainty.

When the network began tracking liver injuries in 2004, supplements accounted for 7 percent of the 115 severe cases. But the percentage has steadily risen, reaching 20 percent of the 313 cases recorded from 2010 to 2012.

Those patients included dozens of young men who were sickened by bodybuilding supplements. The patients all fit a similar profile, said Dr. Navarro, an investigator with the network.

“They become very jaundiced for long periods of time,” he said. “They itch really badly, to the point where they can’t sleep. They lose weight. They lose work. I had one patient who was jaundiced for six months.”

Tests showed that a third of the implicated products contained steroids not listed on their labels.

A second trend emerged when Dr. Navarro and his colleagues studied 85 patients with liver injuries linked to herbal pills and powders. Two-thirds were middle-aged women, on average 48 years old, who often used the supplements to lose weight or increase energy. Nearly a dozen of those patients required liver transplants, and three died.

It was not always clear what the underlying causes of injury were in those cases, in part because patients frequently combined multiple supplements and used products with up to 30 ingredients, said Dr. Bonkovsky, an investigator with the network.

But one product that patients used frequently was green tea extract, which contains catechins, a group of potent antioxidants that reputedly increase metabolism. The extracts are often marketed as fat burners, and catechins are often added to weight-loss products and energy boosters. Most green tea pills are highly concentrated, containing many times the amount of catechins found in a single cup of green tea, Dr. Bonkovsky said. In high doses, catechins can be toxic to the liver, he said, and a small percentage of people appear to be particularly susceptible.

But liver injuries attributed to herbal supplements are more likely to be severe and to result in liver transplants, Dr. Navarro said. And unlike prescription drugs, which are tightly regulated, dietary supplements typically carry no information about side effects. Consumers assume they have been studied and tested, Dr. Bonkovsky said. But that is rarely the case. “There is this belief that if something is natural, then it must be safe and it must be good,” he said.

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So a healthy diet and regular exercise is better than buying weight loss and muscle building supplements? Of course. Also, there are recent studies ( http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20131216/experts-dont-waste-your-money-on-multivitamins ) that conclude multivitamins are a waste of money.

May this information help in your New Year’s resolution formation.

In the pursuit of understanding…
-DjM-

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied-to-dietary-aids.html?_r=1&

Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids

When Christopher Herrera, 17, walked into the emergency room at Texas Children’s Hospital one morning last year, his chest, face and eyes were bright yellow — “almost highlighter yellow,” recalled Dr. Shreena S. Patel, the pediatric resident who treated him.

Christopher, a high school student from Katy, Tex., suffered severe liver damage after using a concentrated green tea extract he bought at a nutrition store as a “fat burning” supplement. The damage was so extensive that he was put on the waiting list for a liver transplant.

“It was terrifying,” he said in an interview. “They kept telling me they had the best surgeons, and they were trying to comfort me. But they were saying that I needed a new liver and that my body could reject it.”

New data suggests that his is not an isolated case. Dietary supplements account for nearly 20 percent of drug-related liver injuries that turn up in hospitals, up from 7 percent a decade ago, according to an analysis by a national network of liver specialists. The research included only the most severe cases of liver damage referred to a representative group of hospitals around the country, and the investigators said they were undercounting the actual number of cases.

While many patients recover once they stop taking the supplements and receive treatment, a few require liver transplants or die because of liver failure. Naïve teenagers are not the only consumers at risk, the researchers said. Many are middle-aged women who turn to dietary supplements that promise to burn fat or speed up weight loss.

“It’s really the Wild West,” said Dr. Herbert L. Bonkovsky, the director of the liver, digestive and metabolic disorders laboratory at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, N.C. “When people buy these dietary supplements, it’s anybody’s guess as to what they’re getting.”

Though doctors were able to save his liver, Christopher can no longer play sports, spend much time outdoors or exert himself, lest he strain the organ. He must make monthly visits to a doctor to assess his liver function.

Americans spend an estimated $32 billion on dietary supplements every year, attracted by unproven claims that various pills and powders will help them lose weight, build muscle and fight off everything from colds to chronic illnesses. About half of Americans use dietary supplements, and most of them take more than one product at a time.

Dr. Victor Navarro, the chairman of the hepatology division at Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia, said that while liver injuries linked to supplements were alarming, he believed that a majority of supplements were generally safe. Most of the liver injuries tracked by a network of medical officials are caused by prescription drugs used to treat things like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, he said.

But the supplement business is largely unregulated. In recent years, critics of the industry have called for measures that would force companies to prove that their products are safe, genuine and made in accordance with strict manufacturing standards before they reach the market.

But a federal law enacted in 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, prevents the Food and Drug Administration from approving or evaluating most supplements before they are sold. Usually the agency must wait until consumers are harmed before officials can remove products from stores. Because the supplement industry operates on the honor system, studies show, the market has been flooded with products that are adulterated, mislabeled or packaged in dosages that have not been studied for safety.

The new research found that many of the products implicated in liver injuries were bodybuilding supplements spiked with unlisted steroids, and herbal pills and powders promising to increase energy and help consumers lose weight.

“There unfortunately are criminals that feel it’s a business opportunity to spike some products and sell them as dietary supplements,” said Duffy MacKay, a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group. “It’s the fringe of the industry, but as you can see, it is affecting some consumers.” More popular supplements like vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fish oil had not been linked to “patterns of adverse effects,” he said.

The F.D.A. estimates that 70 percent of dietary supplement companies are not following basic quality control standards that would help prevent adulteration of their products. Of about 55,000 supplements that are sold in the United States, only 170 — about 0.3 percent — have been studied closely enough to determine their common side effects, said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an expert on dietary supplements.

“When a product is regulated, you know the benefits and the risks and you can make an informed decision about whether or not to take it,” he said. “With supplements, you don’t have efficacy data and you don’t have safety data, so it’s just a black box.”

Since 2008, the F.D.A. has been taking action against companies whose supplements are found to contain prescription drugs and controlled substances, said Daniel Fabricant, the director of the division of dietary supplement programs in the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. For example, the agency recently took steps to remove one “fat burning” product from shelves, OxyElite Pro, that was linked to one death and dozens of cases of hepatitis and liver injury in Hawaii and other states.

The new research, presented last month at a conference in Washington, was produced by the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, which was established by the National Institutes of Health to track patients who suffer liver damage from certain drugs and alternative medicines. It includes doctors at eight major hospitals throughout the country.

The investigators looked at 845 patients with severe, drug-induced liver damage who were treated at hospitals in the network from 2004 to 2012. It focused only on cases where the investigators ruled out other causes and blamed a drug or a supplement with a high degree of certainty.

When the network began tracking liver injuries in 2004, supplements accounted for 7 percent of the 115 severe cases. But the percentage has steadily risen, reaching 20 percent of the 313 cases recorded from 2010 to 2012.

Those patients included dozens of young men who were sickened by bodybuilding supplements. The patients all fit a similar profile, said Dr. Navarro, an investigator with the network.

“They become very jaundiced for long periods of time,” he said. “They itch really badly, to the point where they can’t sleep. They lose weight. They lose work. I had one patient who was jaundiced for six months.”

Tests showed that a third of the implicated products contained steroids not listed on their labels.

A second trend emerged when Dr. Navarro and his colleagues studied 85 patients with liver injuries linked to herbal pills and powders. Two-thirds were middle-aged women, on average 48 years old, who often used the supplements to lose weight or increase energy. Nearly a dozen of those patients required liver transplants, and three died.

It was not always clear what the underlying causes of injury were in those cases, in part because patients frequently combined multiple supplements and used products with up to 30 ingredients, said Dr. Bonkovsky, an investigator with the network.

But one product that patients used frequently was green tea extract, which contains catechins, a group of potent antioxidants that reputedly increase metabolism. The extracts are often marketed as fat burners, and catechins are often added to weight-loss products and energy boosters. Most green tea pills are highly concentrated, containing many times the amount of catechins found in a single cup of green tea, Dr. Bonkovsky said. In high doses, catechins can be toxic to the liver, he said, and a small percentage of people appear to be particularly susceptible.

But liver injuries attributed to herbal supplements are more likely to be severe and to result in liver transplants, Dr. Navarro said. And unlike prescription drugs, which are tightly regulated, dietary supplements typically carry no information about side effects. Consumers assume they have been studied and tested, Dr. Bonkovsky said. But that is rarely the case. “There is this belief that if something is natural, then it must be safe and it must be good,” he said.

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Today’s Yahoo Finance article provides another reminder of the merits of index investing.  I extract a subtle point from the article: large cap indexes are very tough to beat while smaller capitalization indexes are less very tough to beat.  🙂

By the numbers, 70% or more of active fund managers underperform their benchmark.  But what about the 30% that do?  I am unaware of any consistent approach to identify those 30% in advance.  Also, the “group of 30%” changes from year to year.

I recommend the good ‘ol “Core and Explore” approach.  Have at least 75% of your portfolio by the book with index funds.  If you like to gamble, go ahead, but with no more than 25% of the pie.