Raw vegan diets are all the rage these days. Advocates claim that a diet composed exclusively of raw plant foods will support optimal health, protect animals, and save the planet.

The raw truth is that raw vegan diets don't support health for most people, for a very simple reason: Humans are not adapted to a raw vegan diet. For that matter, not even our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, is adapted to a raw vegan diet.

Let's take a critical look at the rationales and effects of raw vegan diets

Raw Rationale

David Wolfe, raw food advocate, wrote a book entitled Nature's First Law (Don't buy it!). In this book, he suggests that the "first law" of nature is that food is raw; if not raw, its not food. He derives this "law" from the observation that no animal other than humans cooks anything before eating it. Thus, humans break the "law."

McDonald's Earned More Revenue From Europe than U.S. in 2009

Decades of trade rules that dismantled or restructured farm safety net programs in the European Union have displaced sustainable, domestic feed grain production and escalated dangerous soy imports from Latin America - and helped turn European farms into polluting factory farms while driving down food quality and expanding waistlines, according to a new report from consumer organization Food & Water Watch.

The report, The Perils of the Global Soy Trade, reveals that EU member states' (EU-15) net soy meal imports grew 57.1 percent since global WTO trade rules entered force, from 12.9 million metric tonnes (28.4 billion pounds) in 1995 to 20.2 million metric tonnes (44.5 billion pounds) in 2007. During the same period, the EU-15 shed 1.7 million farms - nearly a quarter of all farms.

"International trade rules have created a soybean industrial complex that is fattening both livestock and humans in Europe, just like it has in America," says Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter.

Trade rules have made soy a cheaper alternative to domestic feed, helping transform pig and poultry holdings in Europe into factory farms like their U.S. counterparts. With this shift to cheaper feed comes more processed, industrialized, fast food. In 2009, McDonald's actually earned more revenue from Europe (41 percent) than the United States (35 percent.) Now, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil made largely from soybeans is a key shortening in processed desserts and frozen foods as well, adding even more soy to European diets.

In the past several decades, these changes have helped broaden waistlines. The obesity rate in the U.K. more than tripled between 1980 and 2007, and France's nearly doubled between 1990 and 2006. Almost half of Germany's population was obese or overweight in 2005.

Several months ago, I interviewed British doctor Richard Halvorsen concerning the heated vaccine-autism controversy. Dr. Halvorsen had gained a fair amount of attention in the British press. I contacted him recently to get his views on the allegations of fraud against Dr. Andrew Wakefield. He minced no words.

"The latest allegations against Dr Andrew Wakefield are quite extraordinary. It seems that certain factions of the medical establishment are intent on hounding him to the grave.

The accusations of journalist Brian Deer make no sense at all. They appear to centre around the fact that elements of the hospital medical records, as reported in the Lancet 1998 paper, are at odds with other aspects of the children's medical records, mainly those of the children's General Practitioners (GPs). This is hardly surprising as the hospital doctors who recorded the children's medical history (which was not, in any case, done by Dr Wakefield) would not have had access to the GPs' medical notes. Medical histories, taken at different times by different healthcare professionals will inevitably have some inconsistencies.

What is so disturbing is that the editor of the BMJ, who should have known better, appears to have fallen for Deer's spurious arguments hook, line and sinker.

We have to take a step back and wonder what is really going on here. To go to such extreme - and desperate lengths - to annihilate Dr Wakefield (the person, note, not the science) some people must be very afraid. Afraid, presumably, that parents might actually believe something that is blatantly obvious: that is that all vaccines can cause serious adverse reactions, including autism. By denying what is not only obvious but also supported by a wealth of scientific evidence these obsessive vaccine protagonists risk losing the trust of all parents and destroying the whole vaccine programme, the very thing that they are trying to prevent happening."

Dr. Halvorsen has been telling the truth, fearlessly, for quite some time.

China's history with food safety is a rocky one, but even in the annals of robbery and abuse, this will go down in infamy.

Various reports in Singapore media have said that Chinese companies are mass producing fake rice made, in part, out of plastic, according to one online publication Very Vietnam.

The "rice" is made by mixing potatoes, sweet potatoes and plastic. The potatoes are first formed into the shape of rice grains. Industrial synthetic resins are then added to the mix. The rice reportedly stays hard even after being cooked.

Researchers found that air in the immediate vicinity of garages is often polluted and can harm local residents.

Scientists from the University of Murcia studied the effects of contamination at petrol stations that is potentially harmful to health

Experts say it shows that a "minimum" distance of 50 yards should be maintained between petrol stations and housing.

A 100 yards minimum distance should apply to "especially vulnerable" facilities such as hospitals, health centers, schools and old people's homes.

The fifty-year epidemic of lung cancer which has claimed at least one million lives in Britain may have peaked among women, figures show.

Female deaths from lung cancer in the UK are the highest in Europe, reflecting high rates of smoking 30 years ago. But the UK is the only country where the death rate is stable or falling - in all other countries it is still rising, European scientists say.
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Death rates among UK men from lung cancer peaked more than 20 years ago, in the mid 1980s. Men took up smoking earlier than women and in the 1940s around 80 per cent of adult men smoked.

Women did not take up smoking until later, with the numbers peaking in the mid 1960s at around 45 per cent. Growing evidence of the link between smoking and lung cancer from the 1960s onwards, accompanied by advertising bans and tighter restrictions on smoking, gradually persuaded smokers of both sexes to give up the habit. Today, around 20 per cent of men and 24 per cent of women smoke.

Because women took up smoking later, the rise in lung cancer death rates lagged behind that of men and has only begun to level off in the last decade. There is a gap of 30 to 40 years between the date of starting smoking and the onset of cancer.

A new study finds that many women with early breast cancer do not need a painful procedure that has long been routine: removal of cancerous lymph nodes from the armpit.
The discovery turns standard medical practice on its head. Surgeons have been removing lymph nodes from under the arms of breast cancer patients for 100 years, believing it would prolong women's lives by keeping the cancer from spreading or coming back.

Now, researchers report that for women who meet certain criteria - about 20 percent of patients, or 40,000 women a year in the United States - taking out cancerous nodes has no advantage. It does not change the treatment plan, improve survival or make the cancer less likely to recur. And it can cause complications like infection and lymphedema, a chronic swelling in the arm that ranges from mild to disabling.

Removing the cancerous lymph nodes proved unnecessary because the women in the study had chemotherapy and radiation, which probably wiped out any disease in the nodes, the researchers said. Those treatments are now standard for women with breast cancer in the lymph nodes, based on the realization that once the disease reaches the nodes, it has the potential to spread to vital organs and cannot be eliminated by surgery alone.

Experts say that the new findings, combined with similar ones from earlier studies, should change medical practice for many patients. Some centers have already acted on the new information. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan changed its practice in September, because doctors knew the study results before they were published. But more widespread change may take time, experts say, because the belief in removing nodes is so deeply ingrained.

A new study finds that one the fastest-growing classes of prescription drugs in the United States is linked to shrinkage in the brains of those who take it, raising some new questions about the widening use of antipsychotic medications.

Over a study period that spanned 14 years, 211 newly diagnosed schizophrenic patients had periodic brain scans that measured the volume of their brains overall, and of their brains' principal component structures. Scanning each subject's brain at least twice and as many as five times, researchers at the University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine sought to tease apart the factors that might contribute to a long-observed phenomenon: that patients with psychiatric disease - particularly those who suffer the delusional thinking, hallucinations and cognitive deficits of schizophrenia - appear to have smaller brains than those in good mental health.

Twelve countries have reported suspected cases of narcolepsy linked to swine flu jabs, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday as its scientists said the findings warranted more investigation.

The WHO said in a statement that such sleep disorders, mainly in youngsters, had not been seen with vaccines in the past, and were more frequent in Sweden, Finland and Iceland than in other countries.

However, the UN health agency decided to keep its advice in favour of vaccination, including with the Pandemrix vaccine highlighted in the study, because it still felt the benefits outweighed a relatively small risk, spokeswoman Alison Brunier said.

Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder which causes extreme fatigue and often results in the patient falling soundly asleep without warning, even in the middle of an activity.

The Pandemrix vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline was used in 47 countries worldwide during 2009-2010, according to WHO, and was included by the agency in donations made to poor nations during the flu pandemic.

City council has voted to eliminate fluoride from the city's drinking water.

In doing so, aldermen decided not to put the issue to plebiscite or to an expert panel being offered up by the University of Calgary.

Ald. Druh Farrell, who has spearheaded the effort to get the additive out of Calgary's water, said it is a matter of ethics.

She said there are other alternatives to fluoridating water that gives people a choice.

Farrell points to Europe where the additive is not in the water, but the fluoridated salt can be purchased instead.