"It would be nice if you stopped trying to trick kids into wanting to eat your food all the time," quipped 9-year-old Hannah Robertson in a conversation with McDonald's CEO Don Thompson at a shareholders meeting in Oak Brook, Ill.

The fourth grader, whose mom runs a business that encourages children to make healthy food choices, read from prepared remarks as she said that the fast food chain lures kids into eating junk food by using toys and cartoon characters to promote the meals.

"If parents haven't taught their kids about healthy eating, then the kids probably believe that junk food is good for them because it might taste good," said Hannah.

Thompson, in a low, calm voice, responded to Hannah by thanking her for her comments then defending the company's food.

"First off, we don't sell junk food, Hannah," said Thompson. "My kids also eat McDonald's. They cook with me at home. I love to cook. We cook a lot of fruits and veggies at home."

When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.

A 'dead' woman has given birth to a healthy baby - and been brought back to life herself. Erica Nigrelli was 36 weeks pregnant when her heart stopped and she collapsed at work, reports Click2Houston.


Three co-workers at Elkins High School in Missouri City kept Erica alive by using CPR and a defibrillator until paramedics arrived to take her to hospital.

The first symptoms of major depression may be behavioral, but the common mental illness is based in biology -- and not limited to the brain. In recent years some studies have linked major, long-term depression with life-threatening chronic disease and with earlier death, even after lifestyle risk factors have been taken into account.

Now a research team led by Owen Wolkowitz, MD, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, has found that within cells of the immune system, activity of an enzyme called telomerase is greater, on average, in untreated individuals with major depression. The preliminary findings from his latest, ongoing study will be reported today at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco.

Telomerase is an enzyme that lengthens protective end caps on the chromosomes' DNA, called telomeres. Shortened telomeres have been associated with earlier death and with chronic diseases in population studies.

The heightened telomerase activity in untreated major depression might represent the body's attempt to fight back against the progression of disease, in order to prevent biological damage in long-depressed individuals, Wolkowitz said.

© Shutterstock.com/Oliver Hoffmann

    

Despite 20 years of "Got Milk?" mustache ads, milk consumption in the US falls more every year.

The National Dairy Promotion and Research Program and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Program cite competition from calcium-fortified and vitamin-enhanced beverages, milk's lack of availability "in many eating establishments" (You can't find milk anywhere!) and a growing percentage of African Americans and Latinos in the US population who are not traditionally big milk consumers.

Many other groups also shun milk, from teenagers and young adults to dieters, athletes and health-food eaters who reject the cholesterol, fat, calories and allergens. Several Asian ethnic groups also avoid milk, as do the lactose intolerant, the allergic, people who drink or smoke (the tastes don't mix) and animal and environmental activists. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose pediatric advice shaped the entire Baby Boom generation, recommended no milk for children after age two, in his later years, to reduce their risks of heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and diet-related cancers.

RT reported Wednesday on a bizarre spate of respiratory illnesses in Alabama, two resulting in death.

A mysterious respiratory illness has claimed the lives of two people in southeast Alabama, and caused five other hospitalizations. The illness has left health officials baffled, who have no idea what this disease is or where it originated.

The mysterious illness has sickened its victims with flu-like symptoms, including a shortness of breath, fever, and coughing. Of the seven people who were hospitalized with the new disease, two have died, Alabama Department of Public Health spokeswoman Mary McIntyre told AP.

While the cause is currently unknown, it's interesting to note that Southeastern Alabama's cotton fields are in full bloom this time of year - and that some of these crops are Bt cotton. Bt cotton is a genetically modified cotton that contains a Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt) pesticide within the plant.

There is no proof that this is related to the mysterious illnesses in Alabama, however, history shows us that serious illnesses occurred in India wherever Bt cotton was grown.

The world's most popular grain is also the deadliest for the human metabolism. Modern wheat isn't really wheat at all and is a "perfect, chronic poison," according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist, author and leading expert on wheat.

Approximately 700 million tons of wheat are now cultivated worldwide making it the second most-produced grain after maize. It is grown on more land area than any other commerical crop and is considered a staple food for humans.

At some point in our history, this ancient grain was nutritious in some respects, however modern wheat really isn't wheat at all. Once agribusiness took over to develop a higher-yielding crop, wheat became hybridized to such an extent that it has been completely transformed from it's prehistorical genetic configuration. All nutrient content of modern wheat depreciated more than 30% in its natural unrefined state compared to its ancestral genetic line. The balance and ratio that mother nature created for wheat was also modified and human digestion and physiology could simply could not adapt quick enough to the changes.

Johns Hopkins researchers report that hospitals may be reaping enormous income for patients whose hospital stays are complicated by preventable bloodstream infections contracted in their intensive care units.

In a small, new study, reported online in the American Journal of Medical Quality, the researchers found that an ICU patient who develops an avoidable central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) costs nearly three times more to care for than a similar infection-free patient. Moreover, hospitals earn nearly nine times more for treating infected patients, who spend an average of 24 days in the hospital.

The researchers also found that private insurers, rather than Medicare and Medicaid, pay the most for patient stays complicated by CLABSIs -- roughly $400,000 per hospital stay -- suggesting that private insurers would gain the most financial benefit from working with hospitals to reduce infection rates.

"We have known that hospitals often profit from complications, even ones of their own making," says Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president for patient safety for Johns Hopkins Medicine and one of the authors of the research. "What we did not know was by how much, and that private insurers are largely footing the bill."

Chickens likely raised with arsenic-based drugs result in chicken meat that has higher levels of arsenic, which is known to increase the risk of cancer, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The study, published online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, provides evidence that the use of drugs containing arsenic in chicken populations poses public health risks.

Conventional, antibiotic-free, and USDA Organic chicken samples were purchased from 10 U.S. metropolitan areas between December 2010 and June 2011, when an arsenic-based drug known as roxarsone was readily available to poultry companies that wished to add it to their feed. In addition to inorganic arsenic, the researchers were able to identify residual roxarsone in the meat they studied - in the meat where roxarsone was detected, levels of inorganic arsenic were four times higher than the levels in USDA Organic chicken (in which roxarsone and other arsenicals are prohibited from use).

Monsanto just announced a deal with DSM Nutritional Products to sell a new type of genetically engineered (GE) soybean: one with supposed nutritional benefits. The majority of Monsanto's GE crops are engineered to resist Monsanto's herbicide, Roundup, or to produce their own pesticide, Bt. Once farmers harvest them, they are mixed together with non-GE crops and sold to consumers without labels. This new soybean, called the SDA Omega-3 soybean, will be different.

The SDA Omega-3 soybean will be grown, harvested, and processed separately from "commodity" soybeans. Farmers call these "Identity Preserved" soybeans, because everyone from the farmer to the ultimate consumer will know that they came from Monsanto's new seeds.

This soybean is a first for Monsanto. Its previous genetically engineered seeds all provide supposed benefits only for farmers. For example, cotton that produces its own pesticide or soybeans that do not die if they are sprayed with Monsanto's herbicide. Consumers never know if or when they eat these other genetically engineered foods, because they are not labeled.

But the new SDA Omega-3 soybean claims to provide health benefits to consumers. And if you eat it, you will know . . . because they'll likely want to charge you extra for it.