There are several reasons why the medical cartel is too big to fail: the enormous amount of money at stake; its aim to control populations.

In this article, I want to examine a related reason.

Suppose it was discovered that thousands of bridges around the US were in imminent danger of collapsing? Not because maintenance and repair were lacking, not because the materials used to build them were cheap and shoddy. But because the original designs were inadequate and broke basic rules of engineering.

Suppose five or six major manufacturers built their automobiles so the vast majority of power derived from the engines was transferred to one wheel?

Suppose the US Dept. of Agriculture recommended that all farmers spray their crops with heavy chlorine instead of water?

In other words, the science itself is fraudulent.

Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you're partaking of an ancient relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides created by Shell and Bayer and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies like Monsanto.

But never worry, those real life pollinators - the birds and the bees, as they say - may soon be irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.

When you order sushi at your favorite restaurant or pick up a pound of coffee from your local supermarket, you assume you're getting the red snapper or Columbian beans as stated on the menu or label.

But not so fast. A growing number of cases of "food fraud" are occurring in the United States, such that you may not be able to tell what you're really eating just by looking at the label.

Worse still, most of these cases are not highly publicized incidents like the recent scandal of UK supermarkets selling "beef" burgers that actually contained horse and pig meat. Instead, they're ongoing cases of blatant misrepresentation among some incredibly common foods.

Everybody feels stress and knows it intimately, but very few of us think about what stress actually is.

Stress is a thought. That's it. No more, no less. If that's true, then we have complete control over stress, because it's not something that happens to us but something that happens in us.

The dictionary definition of stress is, "bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium." It is your thoughts out of balance.

The medical definition of stress is, "the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego." It could be a tiger chasing you or your belief that your spouse is mad at you (even if he or she is not). Whether it is real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body.

A cascade of adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones floods your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain's memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally wreaking havoc on your body.

Senior scientists have criticised the "appalling irresponsibility" of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

"They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever," Lord May told The Independent.

"The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It's appallingly irresponsible," he said.

The controversial study into viral mixing was carried out by a team led by Professor Hualan Chen, director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.

Professor Chen and her colleagues deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal but not easily transmitted between people, with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.

Do Americans have the right to know what's in our food? Do we have the right to choose to NOT eat Genetically Modified (GMO) food? The next round in the years-long battle has begun, as Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressman Pete DeFazio (D-OR) introduce the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act (read the Senate bill here, House bill here)

The good news:

• This is a bi-partisan bill with a bunch of co-sponsors (listed at the end of this article).
• Labeling has huge public support.

The bad news:

• Big agriculture, and corporate behemoth Monsanto in particular, HATE the idea of labeling. They claim their food is perfectly safe... so we should just shut up and buy it.
• These guys just spent $46 million to kill a ballot measure in California, Prop 37... so you can bet they're going to be spending big bucks to buy this bill a slow and quiet death.
• Monsanto has done a good job of packing Washington with their lobbyists (as well as putting many of their former employees into the very jobs that are supposed to regulate GMO food - see "Monsanto Employees in the Halls of Government Part 1" and "... Part 2".)

Promoted for decades as a "safe" sugar alternative, presumably to prevent or reduce symptoms of diabetes, Splenda (sucralose) has been found to have diabetes-promoting effects in human subjects.

The artificial sweetener sucralose, which is approximately 600 times sweeter than sucrose (table sugar), and marketed under a variety of brand names, such as Splenda, Cukren, Nevella and SucraPlus, has recently been found to diabetes-promoting effects in human test subjects, despite containing no calories and being classified as a 'nonutritive sweetener.'

A new study published in the journal Diabetes Care, lead by researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, set out to test the metabolic effects of sucralose in obese subjects who did not use nonnutritive sweeteners.

Seventeen subjects underwent a 5-hour oral glucose tolerance test on two separate occasions preceded by consuming either sucralose (experimental condition) or water (control condition) 10 min before the glucose load in a randomized crossover design.

Research from the University of Adelaide suggests that mothers who eat junk food while pregnant have already programmed their babies to be addicted to a high fat, high sugar diet by the time they are weaned.

In laboratory studies, the researchers found that a junk food diet during pregnancy and lactation desensitised the normal reward system fuelled by these highly palatable foods.

Led by Dr Bev Mühlhäusler, Postdoctoral Fellow in the University's FOODplus Research Centre, this is the first study to show the effects of maternal junk food consumption at such an early stage in the offspring's life. The study was published recently in The FASEB Journal.

Opioids are produced by the body as a reward response, including in response to fat and sugar. These opioids stimulate the production of the "feel good" hormone dopamine, which produces a good feeling.

Vegetarian diets are correlated with an increase in mental health problems

Entirely vegan diets are unknown among traditional human cultures. Back in the early part of the 19^th century, dentist and explorer Weston Price went looking for vegans, but found only cannibals*. Since vegan diets in nature provide no vitamin B12 and very little in the way of usable long chain omega3 fatty acids, it is not surprising that humans have continued to eat animals and animal-derived products. Nowadays one can obtain algae-derived DHA (the major long chain omega3 fatty acid present in the brain) and supplement B12. That wasn't possible until a few years ago, and there's little evidence that supplementation with DHA alone is helpful for the brain.

We have been encouraged to eat more plants and less animals. Various writers have suggested it is healthier for our bodies and our planet. I have no objections to a mostly plant-based diet as long as attention is paid to protein requirements and micronutrition. However, since little things in animal products (some essential like B12, some that can be created in our bodies but perhaps not in the amounts we need, such as creatine) seem to be very important for the brain, it's interesting to look at the literature on vegetarian diets and mental health. Here is the latest (and the best) observational study: Vegetarian diet and mental disorders: results from a representative community survey.

It's a German study, and for a large population-based retrospective observational design, it's actually fairly thorough and sensible. And if you are a vegetarian, it certainly doesn't say that vegetarianism causes mental health problems. But in all but two studies done in the past, vegetarianism has been linked with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and particularly eating disorders (bingeing, restricting, and purging behaviors). But to be perfectly honest, all those studies had some serious limitations (they were small, done special populations, and often measures based on just a few answers to general survey questions). I've reviewed a few of them. (My favorite has to be the one where they calculated arachidonic acid ingested to the hundredth of a gram based on data from a food frequency questionnaire, which seems very unlikely to be accurate) I don't think it is a coincidence that the two positive studies were done by the same group of researchers in the Seventh Day Adventist population.

The new feature of the antidepressant drugs of the 1990s was that they had milder side-effects than their predecessors. Combined with aggressive marketing, this meant that annual sales in Sweden increased from just under EUR 18 million to over EUR 100 million in the space of just a few years.

Most countries have an established system for self-regulation of pharmaceuticals advertising. Sweden has been held up internationally as a good example. The Swedish pharmaceutical industry's trade organisation appoints an information examiner to monitor the marketing to ensure it doesn't violate established ethical guidelines. There is also a board appointed by the industry that deals with complaints. Misleading advertising usually results in a fine.

"The system of self-regulation was established in 1969 in Sweden, but this is the first academic study of how it really works", says Shai Mulinari, who is a researcher in both social sciences and biomedicine.

Together with a colleague, he has gone through all the advertising for antidepressants published in the professional journal for doctors, The Swedish Medical Journal, between 1994 and 2003. In the study, they found that 34 per cent of all adverts had been judged as misleading by the industry's self-regulation system.