Have you noticed that practically every day a new story comes out in the media about the toxic side effects of living in the modern world? Chemical and heavy metal dangers seem to be lurking everywhere you turn in the 21st century!

Pesticides coat much of our fresh food supply, chemical by-products from manufacturing are routinely dumped into our air and water, and mercury amalgam fillings in your teeth may be releasing mercury into your body with every bite of food you take!

The seafood in our oceans are laden with heavy metals and mercury and pass these poisons up the food chain until potentially massive doses of both wind up on your dinner plate disguised as a healthy meal.

Underground water supplies have been tainted by chemical and pesticide run off from farms, factories and high technology industries. In fact, acceptable levels of many poisons are allowed to come into your home through your drinking and bathing water, including fluoride, chlorine and low levels of many heavy metals.

It doesn't take much imagination to see that your body too is under attack from environmental pollution every single day. You can seek to protect yourself and combat this hazard by eating foods that are free of pesticides and chemicals, but you simply cannot entirely remove all sources of toxins from your environment. The damage to our world is just too widespread and pervasive.

What is MSG and Why is it Used

Without monosodium glutamate (MSG), the modern food industry wouldn't be what it is today. Discovered in Japan in 1908 and dubbed unami, or the fifth flavor, it reacts with the sensory cells of the tongue, and is best described as savory or meaty taste. So, when it's added to food, our brains are tricked into thinking that what we're eating is hearty and rich in protein. It can encourage us to eat products that would otherwise taste bland or outright nasty. What's more is that it leads us to consume foods that are just empty calories without nutritional value, all for the sake of extended shelf life and poor quality ingredients! Plus, MSG is cheap to produce and easy to hide. It can be made from common foods such as corn or soy, and then be given a different name like hydrolyzed plant protein, or hydrolyzed soy extract.

Widespread use in the US food supply began by the late 1940′s as a "flavor enhancer", and even though scientific study has shown since the 1960′s that excessive MSG is linked to nerve, brain, liver damage, and obesity, among other things, it is still in widespread use. This is because the FDA considers it a "generally recognized as safe" ingredient, such as salt, vinegar, or baking powder AND because it only requires that ingredients be listed by their common names. Hence manufacturers have created more than one way to add MSG to products.

It's even being sprayed on crops, in the form of Auxigro, a plant "growth enhancer", approved by the EPA in 1997.

The decoding of the human genome at the dawn of the millennium carried the hope and promise of the beginning of the end of human suffering. However, after more than a decade of intense exploration of the human genome the burden of human disease and suffering has only increased across the globe. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes as well as allergic and autoimmune disorders have all continued to skyrocket. Hope has given way to disappointment as scientists have recognized that, other than in single gene disorders likes Down's syndrome, your genes don't determine your fate.

In November of this year a review on genomics, Type 2 diabetes and obesity in the New England Journal of Medicine (i) sadly reported on how little correlation exists between obesity, diabetes and your genes. There are associated patterns that confer small risks, but the authors lament the lack of stronger connections between genetic makeup and the biggest disease epidemic of our time (obesity and diabetes) with refrains such as "modest effect size," "relatively few successes," "remains far from clear," "poorly captured by existing biologic knowledge."

The story of your health is much more complex than genetic programming. It is ultimately determined by the dynamic interplay of the environment washing over genes creating the "you" of this moment. The good news is that this has been the year of discoveries about "omics" - epigenomics, exposomics, nutrigenomics and microbiomics and toxigenomics - that do, in fact, hold the key to unlocking our health and disease mysteries.

Nearly 75 percent of patients hospitalized for a heart attack had cholesterol levels that would indicate they were not at high risk for a cardiovascular event, according to current national cholesterol guidelines, according to a new national study.

Specifically, these patients had low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, or "good cholesterol," levels that met current guidelines, and close to half had LDL, or "bad cholesterol," levels classified in guidelines as optimal (less than 100 mg/dL).

"Almost 75 percent of heart attack patients fell within recommended targets for LDL cholesterol, demonstrating that the current guidelines may not be low enough to cut heart attack risk in most who could benefit," said Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Science at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the study's principal investigator.

Dr. Fonarow, you may won't to read the numerous medical studies including the study that appeared in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, which reported in 1994 that most individuals with coronary artery disease have normal cholesterol levels! A follow-up study to the now infamous 1948 Framingham study shows that our rush to squelch total cholesterol levels may have been in error. In individuals who are over the age of 65, lowering cholesterol can increase the risk of mortality. To cite the Framingham authors: "For each 1 mg/dl drop of cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in coronary and total mortality."

Chlorine is added to swimming pools to kill bacteria, but Spanish researchers say the chemical in large quantities can cause DNA damage that could increase the risk of cancer.

Their study is published in Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) journal, coordinated by researchers from the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) and the Research Institute Hospital del Mar.

The evidence of DNA damage, known as genotoxic effects, was observed in 49 healthy adults after they spent 40 minutes in a chlorinated indoor pool.

The DBPs formed in the pools are the result of the reactions appeared between the water disinfectants such as chlorine pools and organic matter, which occurs naturally or is introduced by swimmers through sweat, skin cells and urine.

Previous studies found an association between exposure to DBPs of drinking water and bladder cancer risk.

A third of the Irish population now smokes, a new survey reveals.

A survey of 4,082 people this summer revealed that 33pc of the Irish population had taken up or continued to smoke.

It is the highest smoking rate recorded here in the past 11 years, according to the EU's 'HELP -- For A Life Without Tobacco' campaign.

Despite hikes in tobacco tax, the smoking ban and a new law against the public display of cigarettes for sale, the number of smokers has steadily risen since 2007 when 29pc of the population smoked.

The survey, which was conducted between March and September, revealed the largest group of smokers -- 45pc -- is aged between 16 and 30.

Men form the majority of smokers at 38pc, compared with women at 28pc.

Prof Luke Clancy, a respiratory consultant and director general of the Research Institute for a Tobacco Free Society last night described the statistics as very disappointing.

"There is no evidence of any decline in smoking in this survey, indicating a clear need for higher prices of cigarettes and better treatment of tobacco-dependence," he said.

Women are locked into a 'double-shift' of home and work - both roles leaving them suffering with more symptoms of stress than men.

The double whammy of pressure means that women show the classic symptoms of stress - back and neck pain - far more than men, even when physical causes are removed, research has revealed.

The four-year study focused on two groups of men and women - one students, the other workers - in an effort to isolate possible causes of stress.

Health secretary Andrew Lansley is coming under pressure to get a grip on the winter flu outbreak, amid warnings that millions more people need to be vaccinated in order to prevent a mounting death toll.

Lansley was accused of a U-turn as he reinstated a public health advertising campaign after he was warned by government advisers of the need to improve immunisation rates which are at their lowest this winter for many years.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the government's advisers on vaccines to prevent serious illness, said 16 million Britons are at serious risk from flu. The committee said a greater uptake of the jab was vital among groups including pregnant women, those with breathing conditions such as asthma, and people with diabetes or heart, liver or kidney disease.

Lansley has reinstated the national Catch It, Bin It, Kill It advertising campaign. It had been discontinued despite helping educate the public to adopt good hygiene habits during last year's H1N1 swine flu epidemic at a cost of just £609,000.

He has been criticised for not instigating the campaign to urge everyone at risk to get a seasonal flu jab from their GP, for ending the Catch It publicity drive, and for not ensuring that all under-fives were offered the vaccine.

Food purists often fuss about the inadequacies of USDA's organic food standards, how pitifully watered down they are from the lofty principles that built the organic movement. They have a point. After all, the USDA's National Organic Program was created to deal with the big agribusinesses determined to exploit the lucrative organic market. But for all the complaints about federal organic standards, the non-certified alternatives -- with some foods especially -- can be downright scary.

It's ironic that many of the scariest, non-certified organic foods are labeled "natural" -- a term that could not mean less, or mislead more. Like "home-style" or "old-fashioned," the label "natural" can mean whatever the labeler wants it to mean. You could put "natural" on a lab-grade jar of MSG crystals, or on a packet of 10-year-old Twinkies, without violating any law. And all too often it's the companies playing the "natural" card that are doing the most unnatural things to your food.

Consider the widespread use of hexane, a neurotoxin, in processed foods that aren't certified organic (those lame organic standards do at least prohibit hexane use). Hexane is a highly flammable EPA-listed air pollutant that is used in the manufacture of cleaning agents, glues, roof sealer, automobile tires, energy bars, veggie burgers, and soy, corn, and canola oils. If these food products are not certified organic, some of the ingredients have probably been processed with hexane, no matter how many times the word "natural" is stamped on the package. Since hexane is used in the manufacturing process, it's not listed as an ingredient in the foods it helps produce, though residues find their way into the finished product. The European Union has strict standards for acceptable hexane residue levels in soy and oilseed products, but in the U.S., there are no such limits.

As noted in the recent article Flu Crisis Hits Cancer Surgery: Britain Teeters on the Brink of an Epidemic, the flu seems to be hitting Brits pretty hard this winter. So much so that they are now short on inpatient hospital beds in some facilities. The article states that the British health care system is at near epidemic level with the flu:

So far this winter nine children and 18 adults are confirmed to have died from the virus, although in reality this number is expected to be much higher.

One intensive care doctor described the outbreak as the worst he had seen in two decades. Dr Ian Jenkins, former president of the Paediatric Intensive Care Society, who works at Bristol Children's Hospital, said: 'I've not seen this much flu in more than 20 years.'

In another article, Swine flu kills 10 in Britain; sparks fear of another pandemic in 2011, the ghost of the Swine Flu virus is resurrected as the cause of this recent spike in flu-like illness.

While the article starts out with the words, "It's back!", we have some doubt that this soon-to-be flu epidemic is solely the result of this virus. Let's not forget that virus experts stated from the early days of the so-called global Swine Flu pandemic that the Swine Flu virus went global before health authorities could do anything about it. In other words, everybody has experienced this virus to some extent by now, and the results have been somewhat blasé compared to the dire predictions of dead millions initially made by the WHO.

While the spike in flu cases in Britain is very real, the purported Swine Flu virus as the cause is likely another example of medical propaganda run amok. But if this recent epidemic in Britain isn't the result of a measly virus, then what is?