We’ve been lent Holford’s last subscription mail out. There is a separate Special Report: Salvestrols a major breakthrough in cancer prevention? It describes salvestrols as plants’ chemical warfare to defend themselves against attack. But somehow, chemical warfare in this instance doesn’t equate to toxins. Oddly enough, because you can’t eat the recommended amount of salvestrols from diet alone, there is a recommendation for supplementation via food concentrates and pills.

So, that’s clear, thiomersal and aluminium in vaccines are toxins and the the amount is irrelevant even if the latter is acting as an adjuvant and reducing the amount of antigens needed to stimulate a protective response. Salvestrols are chemical warfare but A Good Thing and anti-cancer and we don’t get enough of them so you should supplement your intake in extraordinary amounts because they are natural extracts from organic food and it is impossible that that could be harmful.

So, that’s evil v. good chemical warfare.

Your enhanced information about Mennonites is precisely what is so good about blogging. I will say though that I wonder if the differences were as pronounced back in 1938 although this might all be relatively speaking.

Edit: On related note, I’ve just seen this comment about a date-related squabble about toxins or not in white mushrooms which seems apposite.

Not all Mennonites are like the popular image of the old order Amish. A lot of moderate Mennonites have fully embraced modernity – plumbing, cars, aeroplanes, medicines, the whole nine yards. I know this because when I worked at the NIH I used to share a house with a guy who was a Mennonite – his parents had been Mennonite missionaries in S. Africa. My Mennonite friend was resoundingly normal, went on to medical school and is now a neurologist.

Halvorsen, who is/was a private GP making a tidy living dishing out single vaccines to worried parents, pops up regularly in the papers advocating single jabs instead of MMR and making the usual noises about mercury and aluminium. He has also written a dire “What doctors won’t tell you” type book adding fuel to the vaccine scares. Halvorsen rather reminds me of American “paediatrician-to-the-Hollywood-stars” Dr Jay Gordon that Orac writes about. Halvorsen was also a minor “beneficiary” of the MMR law-suit legal aid gravy train.

It would be perfectly in keeping for Patrick to cite Halvorsen as an authoritative source, given Patrick’s previous enthusiasm for “Saint Andy” Wakefield. What it basically does is make it ever clearer that Patrick has signed up to the “Greening Our Vaccines” crypto-anti-vaccine line,as H’watch noted earlier.

Of course, “Greening Our Vaccines” is to anti-vaccinationism precisely as “Intelligent Design” is to Creationism.

@Professor UKdietitian, as you say, if an anecdote of 2 trumps 1/4million in Holford’s Alt.Reality (Dr Aust TM) then Good Housekeeping outranks a super-journal made of up NEJM, Lancet and the Cochrane reviewers.

@Mary, you are possibly close to the mark in identifying the early formative influences on the infant Holford and his ideas.

Admin edit: Clare, that was deeply unpleasant. Any similar comments will not be allowed through in any form.

I love it that one of Holfords key references is from that scientific medical journal

‘Good Housekeeping’

of similar calibre to his ’2 anecdotal subjects vs around 1/4 million people taking antioxidant supplements’ defensive arguments.

Wow. Such a grasp of popular opinion, whoops, clinical evidence.