Wednesday, June 30 at 5 p.m. PST, 8 p.m. EST
Blog talk radio interview with Jon Hansen

Wednesday, July 28 at 11 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST
Interview with Cheryl Benton and Debbie Zip
I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. PST, 4:30 p.m. EST
Radio interview with David Steinman
David is an environmentalist, consumer advocate, and author. I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

Listen to the interview here. zSHARE – Nancy Deville.mp3

(You need an Mp3 player installed on your computer to listen to the interview, for Windows Media Players follow instructions to install the plugin required).

It’s a great thing that awareness has peaked to the point where the president of the United States issues a proclamation about it. Millions of lives depend on people knowing and caring.

For those listeners who would like more information on how to prevent sex trafficking or to help trafficked women and children, below are three organizations that are working to help trafficked people (sex slaves and other types of bondage):

Prostitution Research and Education
Free the Slaves
Somaly Mam Foundation

The story of this nineteen-year old Moldovan woman is typical of what is happening to girls trafficked from Eastern block countries, only she was very lucky to have escaped. Moldova is a landlocked country sandwiched between Romania and the Ukraine. It’s extremely impoverished and is a hunting ground for sex traffickers. Many of these girls leave home tricked into thinking that they will be getting good jobs in the west so that they can support their children and families. Instead they end up in Italy, where picking up a streetwalker has become so affordable that Italian men are indulging and society has accepted the practice. In other words, people are ignoring the fact that the girls are working as slaves. They can’t run to the police because the police are their customers. The sex slavers threaten, and then follow through, with harming and even killing their family members if the girls try to escape.

Very few stories on sex trafficking focus on the men who buy women. In my opinion, men who buy trafficked girls should be given heavy jail sentences, including and especially the police.

I’ve known Mia Lundin, a nurse practitioner and hormone replacement expert for many years and she is the real thing. She knows what she’s talking about and has helped thousands of women feel better and live better lives. Check her out on YOUTUBE and check out her book The Female Brain Gone Insane on www.amazom. In the coming weeks Mia will be guest blogging so stay tuned. The following is her first guest blog:

Female Brain Gone Insane; An Emergency Guide For Women Who Feel Like They Are Falling Apart.
By Mia Lundin R.N.C., N.P.

Are you on an emotional rollercoaster? Do you feel like you are losing it or going insane? One minute you are agitated, and lash out irrationally at friends and loved ones. The next minute you weep and want to be held. You feel overwhelmed, sad beyond words, or scared for no apparent reason. You find it difficult to shut down your anxious brain to go to sleep and then you wake in the middle of the night wide-eyed, with your heart racing. You push forward with all of your might, but inside you feel like you are falling apart. You are not alone. Many women feel just like you, hoping and praying for an end to their suffering.
All women share the same desires. We want to make life run smoothly for those we love. We spend our days fulfilling endless commitments and are dedicated to take care of everyone else’s needs. But we can only do so much. Exhausted because we try to achieve impossibly high standards, we rush around to keep full schedules and make sure everyone is cared for. What happens? We rarely rest or pay attention to what is going on inside of us. In our mid-thirties to late-fifties, our bodies go through many changes. Our hormones, particularly the female hormone estrogen, can fluctuate radically, and our brain chemistry can become imbalanced. Having too much or too little of the hormones and neurotransmitters required for health and balance can create all kinds of symptoms that make us feel out of sorts, or worse. Common symptoms include: crying spells, irritability, rage, panic attacks, uncontrolled irrational tantrums, anxiety, depression, faulty memory, insomnia, confusion, and fuzzy brains. Over time, we forget the happy, functional person we once were and we only see ourselves as miserable with this litany of discomforts. Riding an emotional roller coaster is consuming and debilitating, plus it can be just plain terrifying.

I know it’s difficult to consider yet another set of options and solutions. Your brain might not be operating at its optimum level right now and plowing through another book on women and hormones is not what you want to do. However, I promise you, I have made every effort to make Female Brain Gone Insane as simple and easy to use as possible. It is designed as your own hands-on how-to manual back to health. Think of it as a long consultation with me, a virtual meeting of sorts, one that gives you the tools, recommendations, and empowerment to take care of yourself. Right now.

Strange as it may seem, I couldn’t be more grateful for the lessons I learned from my own female brain gone insane. After all of these years, I still remember vividly what an emotional meltdown feels like. I know the ravages of riding the radical ups and downs of hormonal change, thinking it will never end. I also know how overwhelmed, lost, and desperate you can feel if you suffer alone. So join me as I share the wisdom I have gathered, along with profiles of women who have gone through my treatment program and are living happy, healthy lives. Knowledge is power, and I promise, the more you listen to, understand, and learn how to feed your body what it actually screams for, the faster you will regain control over your emotional ups and downs and physical discomfort and heal. May this book provide you with the information, inspiration, and support to pull yourself out of the trenches where you feel like you are falling apart and bring you to safe ground. Reclaim the feeling of balance and harmony that allows you to live the rest of your life to its fullest.

Mia Lundin, NP, RN, is an authority and pioneer in the field of women’s health. She is the founder and director of The Center for Hormonal and Nutritional Balance Inc., in Santa Barbara, California, where she has successfully treated thousands of women. FEMALE BRAIN GONE INSANE is her first book.  For more information about Mia Lundin, visit her website at www.femalebraingoneinsane.com, or her practice website at www.hormonesandnutrition.com. She can also be followed on facebook or twitter.

A friend of mine emailed me this YOUTUBE video. She mentioned that when the video got a million hits the hospital would offer free mammograms (an X-Ray picture of the breast). I replied, “Great, more women can have ‘the irradiation equal to standing within a mile of the epicenter of the Hiroshima bomb explosion.’” (Samuel Epstein, M.D.)”

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade and I know that “free mammograms” sounds generous. But the truth is that free mammograms are about as nice as a gift basket of plutonium rods.

For years I’ve questioned the use of mammograms as a way to detect breast cancer. It seemed counterintuitive to smash our delicate tissue between cold metal plates and then beam our gorgeous body parts with radiation. Like most women, I love my boobs and I don’t want to lose them. That is the single reason way the mammogram industry has flourished and why this industry is making billions of dollars every year.

When I completely swore off mammograms I turned to thermography (medical infrared imaging), which is a safe and effective way of early detection. But thermography is not available to all women and is not paid for by insurance. (More about this shortly.)

On November 16 I was taught a lesson that will stay with me for a long time. I was actually was pressured into having a mammogram against all of my education and all of my better judgment. I was scheduled to leave on three back-to-back trips that would take me away from home for six weeks when I found a lump in my breast while taking a shower. I’ve lived in Boston now for two years but I had no idea where to go. A good friend of mine found me “the breast guy” and so I was able to go in to see him. In the course of the consultation he convinced me that I needed a mammogram.

My choice would have been to fly back to LA where I know I can have thermography done. But because of my travel schedule, and the fact that I knew that I couldn’t attend the Wilderness First Responder Course and keep my wits about me while worrying about breast cancer, I succumbed.

The technician took a couple of films. All the while I felt a welling of rebellion. I asked, “So how many are you planning on taking?” She answered “Nine more.” That did it for me. “I’ll let you finish this side but then I’m done.”

As it turned out, the lump was a benign cyst that could have been detected with ultra sound. So I was put through all that smashing and radiation just so the clinic could collect the fee from my insurance company.

The very next day, ironically the media was on fire with the report that The United States Preventative Services Task Force (an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care that are appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services) had issued a recommendation that women have fewer mammograms.

The proclamation set off a hailstorm of protests from women around the country who have been browbeaten and terrified into believing that mammograms someone offer protection from dying of breast cancer.

I had even more reason to be annoyed.

After that experience I understood that even though I’ve been an alternative health writer for 13 years, I’m educated about the very significant risks of mammograms, and I am also educated about the alternative to mammograms, I still got sucked into, pressured, and bullied into mammography. Me, of all people! Then I really understood that those who do not have access to what I know about mammograms and the alternatives are never, ever going to let go of this dangerous and cancer causing procedure. Unless of course women become educated. And if you have heard me speak then you know my mantra is “get educated.”

But I am educated! That is what was so mindboggling. The reason I was susceptible to being pressured into a mammogram is that in Boston—land of the very, very, very mainstream medicine—you cannot find thermography.

So let me just educate you, and reeducate myself so this doesn’t happen again to me, and so that you’ll have something to ponder the next time you contemplate letting some rubber gloved technician cram your breasts onto that cold metal plate.

The key to surviving breast cancer is early detection. If a tumor is discovered early 95 percent of women will survive. This commonsensical fact is used diabolically by the mammography industry to make billions every year. The horrible truth is that mammograms have contributed to the epidemic rise in breast cancer because radiation is carcinogenic. If the FDA would admit to this, this industry would be inundated with class action lawsuits, and if your don’t understand that those with the deepest pockets own the FDA then you have been living on Mars.

I first started questioning mammograms intuitively, and then began to read about studies done here in the US, in Canada, Scotland, and Sweden that concluded that mammograms did not reduce breast cancer deaths. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that women were dying of breast cancer, but with the advent of mammograms women knew they were going to die sooner rather than later, but died anyway.

Meanwhile, women’s breasts were being irradiated, which damages DNA and cells, and exposes benign tumors to radiation. More cancer tumors are developing as a result. With each mammogram your risk of developing cancer increases 1-3 percent and this risk is accumulative. And mammograms have a 90 percent false positive rate and so have resulted in unnecessary biopsies, breast surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy. To add insult to injury, mammograms smash existing tumors and exacerbate metastases.

If you want to read more about why to have a mammogram you can pick up the scary propaganda in your doctor’s office courtesy of the billion-dollar mammogram industry. If you’re interested in further education, here are a few more alternative articles.

ARE MAMMOGRAMS WORTH IT? By John R. Lee, M.D.

TRUTH SQUAD—MEDICAL REPORTING ON MAMMOGRAMS By Maggie Mahar

MAMMOGRAM CONTROVERSY – FOLLOW THE MONEY By Virginia Hopkins

You do have recourse to mammograms. One is an MRI scan—which gives a clear picture of the breast but is expensive and is not paid for by insurance. (Let me just say that if insurance companies paid for medical modalities that actually helped people stay well rather than modalities that contributed to disease they would ultimately save money, but the insurance industry is just another industry that is in the pocket of big drug and big medical corporations.)

Thermography, a noninvasive, pain-free, infared image of the breasts is based on the premise that before the growth of abnormal cells can occur, the body must produce an increased blood supply to the growth area. Thermography measures the heat generated by the microcirculation near any abnormal growth. For that reason, thermography can detect abnormal occurrences in the breasts before the actual tumor develops. My thermography doctor in Los Angeles charges $175.

The next time your doctor suggests a mammogram do what I (usually) do, say “When men smash and irradiate their testicles, I’ll have a mammogram,” then go out and find a reputable thermography clinic.

Come back tomorrow for some do’s and don’ts to prevent breast cancer.

We spend too much time talking about mammograms, biopsies, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and not enough time talking about prevention.

DON’TS

1. Don’t smoke. Smoking isn’t sexy and in fact is gross and deadly.
2. Don’t take birth control pills. I can’t think of a more sinister way the drug industry preys on innocent women. Birth control pills dump artificial hormones into your beautiful young bodies, and wreck havoc on your endocrine system. Imbalanced hormones are a huge contributing factor to developing cancer.
3. Don’t use drug/horse urine HRT. That means Premarin and Provera. You can read more about this on Virginia Hopkins’s site.
4. Don’t be sedentary. A sedentary lifestyle means a high insulin lifestyle and prolonged high insulin levels are associated with cancer.
5. Don’t eat sugar and refined carbs. Sugar is cancer fertilizer.
6. Don’t swill every night. If you’re drinking a bottle of wine every night, you need to figure out why you’re so unhappy.
7. Don’t allow caffeine to rule your life. Caffeine causes insulin levels to stay in a prolonged high state.
8. Don’t drink diet drinks. Aspartame causes cancer. Sucralose is a chlorinated molecule and chlorine is definitively inked to cancer.
9. Don’t allow your stress to rule your life. Stress keeps you in a prolonged high insulin state.
10. Avoid toxic exposures. Of course you’d have to live in a bubble but easy things you can do are:

• Don’t eat factory produced food, which is filled with cancer causing agents.
• Don’t eat any refined soy. Soy isoflavones are estrogen mimickers that contribute to cancer growth.
• Don’t eat corn, safflower, soy, peanut, cottonseed, or canola oils, which are omega 6 oils and contribute to cancer.
• Also don’t eat hydrogenated fats, deep fried, fake butter, “healthy” omega 3 spreads, or otherwise processed fats.
• Don’t drink tap water, it’s fluorinated and chlorinated both of which are carcinogenic.
• Don’t drink out of plastic water bottles. Plastic emits xenohormones (estrogen mimickers) into your water.
• Don’t consume produce grown with pesticides and herbicides. These are xenohormones, which are estrogen mimickers (they cause cancer to grow rapidly)
• Don’t consume factory produced milk, it’s produced with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), which results in insulin‑like growth factor-one (IGF-1), which causes cells to divide and exerts rapid-cell growth on breast cells. Commercial milk also contains pesticide and herbicide residue.
• Don’t use toxic chemical laden personal care and household products.
• Don’t fertilize your lawn with toxic fertilizers. That junk you put on your lawn every summer might be growing more than grass.
• Do you really need that cocktail of prescription and OTC drugs? All drugs are toxic to cells.
• Avoid vaccines, which contain mercury, a carcinogenic.
• Avoid X-rays.
• Avoid obvious poisons like insect repellents, flea collars, and flea and roach bombs.
• Get rid of your microwave. Microwaves change (destroy) the molecular structure of food by radiation. Never microwave plastic, which infuses your food with xenohormones.
• Never carry your cell phone next to your body. Limit time on your cell.

DO’S

1. Quit smoking. Read my quit smoking post on my DEATH BY SUPERMARKET blog, it’s a program that works.
2. Have a water filter installed in your home.
3. Use bio-identical HRT. You can read more about this on Virginia Hopkins’s site.
4. Eat real, natural, whole foods that have been organically grown or raised.
5. If you must eat soy, eat only naturally fermented soy such as very small amounts of shoyu, or a few edamame (steamed soy pods), which have not matured enough to develop potent isoflavones.
6. Juice organic greens and drink this juice every day.
7. Take good quality supplements (not Big Box, drug store, or grocery store brands). I take Dr. Ron’s. If this is too pricey you can buy quality supplements at a discount from SMARTbomb and PROFESSIONAL SUPPLEMENT CENTER (they have free shipping). Make sure you are getting enough vitamin D, the number one cancer fighting vitamin. When the weather is warm, you can get 100,000 units of vitamin D from 20 minutes of mid-day exposure to the sun. Sunblock has caused our entire population to be vitamin D deficient. We need to get back into safe tanning.
8. Eat life-giving, cancer fighting fats: organically produced, cold pressed olive oil, sesame, butter, cod-liver oil, and especially coconut oil.
9. Consume organically produced whole milk, and especially raw (un-pasteurized) milk if your state allows it. If your state does not allow the sale of raw milk, it’s possible to buy a share in a cow from a local farm, and share in the cow’s milk production.
10. Buy organically produced personal care and household products.
11. Make your own fertilizer with compost, fish emulsion, and other natural sources.
    Use natural insect repellents like citronella.
12. Cut down or quit all the drugs you can (with your doctor’s supervision).
13. Instead of toxic vaccinations, build up your immune system with healthy eating and lifestyle habits and take enough vitamin D.
14. Heat your food up in the oven.
15. Meditate rather than incubating cancer cells through stress.
16. Get enough rest and sleep, and have fun every day.
17. Exercise to sweat out toxins (plan on reading my blog SWEAT YOUR BUTT OFF to be published on Jan. 15, 2010)
18. Reduce the amount of electromagnetic radiation you are exposed to from your cell by putting it on speaker and waiting for the connection before you hold it to your head. Carry it away from your body and turn it off at night.

There are more than a few problems with this choice as I see it from my vantage point of a 59-year old woman.

First, there is no such thing as anonymity today. If a young woman chooses prostitution she will never outlive the stigma. It might seem cool now and possible to lead a double life. But the word “secret” is obsolete with the Internet and the globalization of everyone’s private matters.

Eventually these voluntary prostitutes will have both emotional scars and societal judgments. In my circle of friends, which is pretty wide, I can’t think of one successful man who would marry a former prostitute.

I did a lot of research into the plight of prostitutes for my novel Karma. Even though Karma is about forced prostitution (sex trafficking), the stigma of being a prostitute is the same for both those who are forced and those who volunteer. The word “prostitution” denotes the lowest rung of societal vermin.

Self blame and low self esteem are endemic to all who are forced into prostitution. Self-blame is one of the hallmark manifestations of post traumatic stress disorder, which all trafficked women suffer from. By delving into the true meaning of karma, the main character of my novel comes to understand that karma isn’t cause and effect like we think in the West. When something bad happens to you it affords an opportunity to contribute to the good karma of the world with your actions to make the world a better place. My character’s epiphany represents what I would like to see happen for all rescued victims of sex trafficking: the self compassion to accept that what happened to them not their fault that they are victims and valuable human beings who deserves happiness.

For those who voluntarily sell their most precious possession—their bodies—I also wish for self-forgiveness and self-compassion.

Moreover, I wish these girls would consider taking out a student loan, then working on developing a mission for their lives.

Oprah dedicated one show to celebrities and luminaries such as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talking about the issue of “gender inequity.” The show was intended to promote Half the Sky the book Kristof wrote with his wife Sheryl WuDunn.

Oppression of women and “gender inequity” is one way to couch sex slavery in terms that people can accept and digest. The reality is much more brutal. Stealing a person’s life, whether it be a young woman, girl, or boy, raping, maiming, and killing her or him is much more difficult to face. But this is what his happening across the globe, including in the United States.

The reason sexual slavery has exploded is that it isn’t punished the way drug trafficking is. Sex traffickers and the rapists who buy their “merchandise” are not punished. Twenty-nine percent of state and federal budgets are spent on the war on drugs, that’s over 19 billion dollars every year. Money is spent on fighting prostitution too, for such efforts as “street cleaning” Los Angeles spends about 100 million a year. But these efforts punish the women, not the pimps and their customers.

If you just take the trafficked girls from Moldova as an example. Moldova is an impoverished Eastern European country where sex traffickers can easily prey on girls desperate for decent jobs. They are promised nanny, waitress, and other jobs in Italy and Great Britain. They leave their homes, and sometimes small children behind. Then they are gang raped and trafficked to Italy. Now there are so many girls on the streets of Rome—just steps from Vatican City—that visiting a prostitute has become affordable and socially acceptable, including for the police. If the girls try to escape, their families back home are harmed and sometimes killed.

Would some of these customers care if they understood they were rapists? I believe that some men would care. And that is why education is vital. What is socially acceptable behavior in Italy, Great Britain, the United States, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and so forth may be shunned once men are educated.

Of course some men wouldn’t care if they understood that they were raping unwilling innocent women and girls—and sometimes little boys, and these are the ones that deserve long prison sentences. But until governments, including the US, are willing to spend money educating, and prosecuting and punishing pimps and their customers, women and children will continue to be trafficked.

In short, trafficking women and children has become more lucrative that trafficking drugs. The merchandise is there for the picking. Women and children are easily taken across borders because they are made to afraid to reveal what is happening to them to officials they may encounter, and they are disposable when they are no longer of use to traffickers. Some end up being killed and their organs sold. Others are just discarded.

VISIT WOMEN FOR WOMEN INTERNATIONAL TO READ MORE ABOUT HALF THE SKY.

I’m not wild about being cold (it’s 8 below this morning), the days are really long, and the material is pretty dense. Everyone is tired at the end of the day. But it’s really cool to be here, to be meeting a lot of people dedicated to the outdoors who are living their passions and following their dreams.

One of the instructors Ryland Gardener begins every morning with a quotation. This morning it was from a Buddhist text:

The master in the art of living makes little distinction his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.

Think about that when you decide on your life mission.