Adults who consume high levels of sugar have significantly elevated levels of several risk factors for heart disease, according to a new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, and in Japan.

The study results suggest that U.S. dietary guidelines for sugar may be lax and should be reconsidered, the researchers say. Their findings will be reported online today (July 28) in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, and will appear in the journal's October print edition.

"While there is evidence that people who consume large amounts of sugar are more likely to have heart disease or diabetes, it has been controversial as to whether high-sugar diets may actually promote these diseases," said Kimber Stanhope, the study's senior author and a research scientist at UC Davis.

"Our new findings demonstrate that several factors associated with an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease were increased in individuals who consumed 25 percent of their calories as fructose or high fructose corn syrup," Stanhope added.

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- better known as the DSM -- has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there's the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That's a label almost everyone can lay claim to.

These codes are used by doctors, psychologists, and regulators to maintain a mutual language; it's a handy shorthand system for bureaucratic purposes. But over the past few decades, the staggering, ever-expanding influence of the ever-expanding DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, has also played a lead role in building wealth and off-label product uses for the major drug manufacturers. In an insightful essay in this week's New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains how.

Angell's essay is based on a review of three current books examining the psychiatric industry: The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker, and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry--A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat. She also cites the DSM-IV, the most recent edition of the manual, while her review traces big pharma's role in our current mental disorder epidemic to the DSM-III, published in 1980.

More than 16 percent of U.S. adults have high cholesterol, defined as 240 mg/dL and above, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even the average level for Americans, 200 mg/dL, is borderline high, they say.

This high cholesterol, public health agencies say, is putting people at an increased risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This stated "fact" scares millions of Americans into take statin cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their levels as low as possible ... but what if this "fact" was actually not true?

Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?

Cholesterol is actually an essential part of your body, used to produce cell membranes, steroid hormones, vitamin D and the bile acids your body needs to digest fat. Your brain needs cholesterol to function properly, as does your immune system, and if a cell becomes damaged, it needs cholesterol in order to be repaired.

In fact, making excess cholesterol is actually your body's response to inflammation, which it does to help heal and repair your cells. So if you have high cholesterol you probably have high inflammation levels too (more on this later).

Many Americans are under the mistaken impression that all cholesterol is bad, but in reality cholesterol is good for your body and necessary for you to live. Unfortunately, the "lipid hypothesis" (aka the "diet-heart hypothesis"), the one that claims foods high in saturated fats drive up your cholesterol levels, which clog your arteries and lead to heart disease, is widely accepted and has helped to spread the misinformation about cholesterol throughout the public.

But the lipid hypothesis is actually seriously flawed.

In his book The Cholesterol Myths, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., explained that Ancel Keys, who performed the study upon which the Lipid Hypothesis is based, used cherry-picked data to prove his point that countries with the highest intake of animal fat have the highest rates of heart disease.

Ravnskov revealed that the countries used in the study were handpicked, and those that did NOT show that eating a lot of animal fat lead to higher rates of heart disease were left out of the study, leading to entirely skewed, and faulty, data.

Part of the possible connection between diet and mental illness is how a bad diet can lead to a generalized inflammatory state. The theory goes like so: first you eat a ton of vegetable oil in processed food that fills the body with inflammatory molecules derived from the omega-6 fatty acids, then you add a lot of grains or legumes with lectins and immunoreactive proteins, and top it off lots of modern chronic stress. Do this for a long period of time, and your body gets irritated - obesity, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune diseases are all related to inflammation. Turns out your brain can get pretty irritated too.

It is well known that symptoms of clinical depression are likely mediated by inflammation in the brain. A number of lines of evidence support this idea, including that depressed people, old and young, have elevated levels of certain inflammatory proteins in the plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. Anti-inflammatory agents treat depression, and pharmacologic agents such as interferon, that cause depression, also lead to increases in the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-alpha. In addition, when someone who is depressed responds to an antidepressant treatment, these same inflammation markers decrease ¹. People with generalized inflammatory syndromes (such as acute viral illness, rheumatoid arthritis, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease) have higher rates of depression than the general population too. I also notice in my clinic that people who have had bone surgery tend to get depressed for a few weeks after the operation, more so than people who had other kinds of surgery. I always wonder if sawing through the bones releases an enormous wave of inflammatory cytokines.

. . . or beans, or brown rice, or sweet potatoes? Or how about amaranth, sorghum, oats, and buckwheat? Surely corn on the cob is okay!

These are, of course, non-wheat carbohydrates. They lack several crucial undesirable ingredients found in our old friend, wheat, including no:

• Gliadin - The protein that degrades to exorphins, the compound from wheat digestion that exerts mind effects and stimulates appetite to the tune of 400 additional calories (on average) per day.
• Gluten - The family of proteins that trigger immune diseases and neurologic impairment.
• Amylopectin A - The highly-digestible "complex" carbohydrate that is no better - worse, in fact - than table sugar.

So why not eat these non-wheat grains all you want? If they don't cause appetite stimulation, behavioral outbursts in children with ADHD, addictive consumption of foods, dementia (i.e., gluten encephalopathy), etc., why not just eat them willy nilly?

Dr. Eric Westman has been a vocal proponent of carbohydrate restriction to gain control over diabetes, as have Drs. Richard Bernstein, Mary Vernon, Richard Feinman, and Jeff Volek.

Several studies over the years have demonstrated that reductions in carbohydrate content of the diet yield reductions in weight and HbA1c (glycated hemoglobin, a reflection of average blood glucose over the preceding 60-90 days).

Among the more important recent clinical studies is a small experience from Duke University's Dr. Eric Westman. In this study, obese type 2 diabetics reduced carbohydrate intake to 20 grams per day or less: no wheat, oats, cornstarch, or sugars. Participants ate nuts, cheese, meats, eggs, and non-starchy vegetables.

• Charred bits of plastic shrink wrap found in some vials of Merck vaccines
• Merck said it is still working to resolve the problem
• Company said it isn't aware of any adverse health events from the issue

Charred bits of plastic shrink wrap have been found in vials of Merck & Co. (MRK) vaccines, the latest quality problem identified by U.S. regulators at the company's biggest vaccine-making plant and an issue the drug maker said it is still working to resolve.

Merck said it isn't aware of any adverse health events associated with the problem, and that it is confident in the safety and efficacy of its products. The affected vaccines included Gardasil for the prevention of HPV infection, Varivax for chicken pox, Pneumovax for pneumococcal disease, Zostavax for shingles and MMR II for measles, mumps and rubella.

In 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a formal warning letter about deficiencies at Merck's West Point, Pa., plant. Since then, FDA inspection reports have cited more problems: the presence of metal particles in certain products, cracks in vaccine vials and delays in Merck's reporting to the FDA of adverse events from products made at the plant.

As Grist readers know, "mythbusting" Scientific American blogger Christie Wilcox took on organic agriculture recently in "Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming Conventional Agriculture." Now, I do agree that there should be no sacred cows - we should examine everything with a critical, if not jaundiced, eye. And indeed Wilcox brings up issues surrounding organic ag about which many people may not be aware. But sadly, her analysis goes quickly and seriously off the rails.

First the good points: Organic ag does use pesticides, sometimes in large quantities. This is not a new revelation: There are a set of pesticides approved for organic use, including copper and sulfur anti-fumigants and the naturally occurring Bt toxin. Copper and sulfur in particular are often overused, especially among fruit growers. While these chemicals can be used by any scale of farmer, it's a particular problem among so-called "industrial organic" farmers.

As the organic industry has taken off, many large-scale farmers have in essence adapted the industrial agriculture mindset - with its monocropping, its focus on inputs and outputs and maximizing productivity -- if not all its techniques. Tom Philpott has written about the problematic nature of this phenomenon; for a deep dive on the subject, I recommend Sam Fromartz's excellent Organic, Inc.

We are confronted with the most powerful technology the world has ever known, and it is being rapidly deployed with almost no thought whatsoever to its consequences." - Dr Suzanne Wuerthele, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxicologist.

Most Americans are unaware that they eat a steady diet of genetically modified food. This is mainly because the GMO giants, as if ashamed of their creation, refuse to allow labels on food that contains genetic engineering.

Consumers are also generally distracted by all the other things on food labels that they're supposed to be concerned about. And when they are exposed to information on GMOs, it's usually from a mainstream source featuring "philanthropist" Bill Gates beaming a smile while expounding the "benefits" that GMOs bring to starving people.

They typically don't hear about studies that show crop yields with GMOs are actually lower than with non-GM crops, or that they require far more pesticides than heirloom seeds, or that some are patented "terminator" seeds that don't re-germinate, which ensures an eventual monopoly over food. Or, perhaps one of the worst findings, that hamsters in one study became completely infertile, among other disturbing effects, after only 3 generations of eating GM soy.

Could omega-3 fats, the kind most often found in fish oil, help reduce stress?

A new study from Ohio State University sought to answer that question, by looking at how omega-3 fats could help decrease anxiety among university students.

Inflammation and Anxiety Reduced by Omega-3 Fats

Consuming more fish oil showed a marked reduction both in inflammation and, surprisingly, in anxiety among the healthy young people in the study.

The findings suggest that if young participants can get such improvements from specific dietary supplements, then the elderly and people at high risk for certain diseases might benefit even more.