"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying. The reality is, we don't know. The experiments simply haven't been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs." ~ David Suzuki, geneticist

Now that the mainstream media is catching on to the public sentiment against GMO food, or at least against unlabeled GMO food, to the tune of millions of Americans who made it a point to drag themselves out of their homes to protest Monsanto last month (as well as at least 40 additional countries), inevitably the indictment will be made: "the anti-GMO movement is "unscientific."" Is that really so?

What we do know is that the unintended consequences of the recombinant DNA process employed to create genetically engineering organisms are beyond the ability of present-day science to comprehend. This is largely due to the post-Human Genome Project revelation that the holy grail of molecular biology, the overly-simplified 'one gene > one trait' model, is absolutely false.

Since 2010, at least three ruptured pipelines have spilled oil into U.S. neighborhoods, forcing officials to decide quickly whether local residents would be harmed if they breathed the foul air. But because there are no clear federal guidelines saying if or when the public should be evacuated during an oil spill, health officials had to use a patchwork of scientific and regulatory data designed for other situations.

As a result, residents of the three communities received different levels of protection.

No houses were evacuated in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a ruptured pipeline leaked 33,000 gallons of medium grade crude oil before it was discovered on the morning of June 12, 2010. The oil ran down Red Butte Creek, past neighborhoods where windows were left open in the summer heat. The fumes, which are known to cause drowsiness, left some people so lethargic that they didn't wake up until after noon.

In Marshall, Mich. officials called for a voluntary evacuation after more than a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude spilled into the Kalamazoo River on July 25, 2010. But they agonized over the decision for four days before making that recommendation.

In Mayflower, Ark. authorities quickly evacuated 22 families after a broken pipeline leaked about 200,000 gallons of heavy crude on March 29, 2013. But people living in the same subdivision, just a few blocks away, were not asked to leave. Neither were the residents of the lakeside community where the oil eventually pooled and where the cleanup continues today.

After each of these spills, people complained of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems - short-term symptoms that health experts say are common after any chemical spill and usually disappear as the air clears.

The latest news out of Oregon is that two wheat farms there have filed suit against Monsanto, charging that their businesses have been harmed by the discovery in the state of a field of genetically modified wheat from seeds that Monsanto developed and supposedly discontinued almost a decade ago. At the same time, the Center for Food Safety has filed a similar suit. It is possible that one or both of the suits could achieve class action status.

So what do we know? Very little, as it happens.

We know that there is a field with wheat that has been grown from genetically engineered seeds. We know Monsanto says it is shocked that this has happened, while cynics (and I'm one of them) believe that Monsanto is shocked like Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) was when he found out there was actually gambling going on at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca.

I'm not going to litigate the whole GMO issue here. For one thing, it would take way too long and would be way too complicated. For another, I'm not nearly smart enough to understand it all, much less explain it.

The emerging and surprising view of how the enteric nervous system in our bellies goes far beyond just processing the food we eat.

As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our "second brain".

A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.

For decades, many scientists and the media have been waging a war against fat.

The idea that fat caused harm was never based on any facts and has now been proven to be completely false.

But yet this bias against perfectly healthy foods lingers on... foods that have been demonized for the sole reason that they are naturally high in saturated fats.

Here are 4 foods that were considered "dangerous" due to their fat content, but are actually extremely healthy.

The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare. But if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

Renowned ethicist Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals.

It takes somewhere between two to ten kilos of plants, depending on the type of plants involved, to produce one kilo of animal. Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would seem to some to make more sense to focus our culinary attentions on plants, because we would arguably get more energy per hectare for human consumption. Theoretically this should also mean fewer sentient animals would be killed to feed the ravenous appetites of ever more humans.

But before scratching rangelands-produced red meat off the "good to eat" list for ethical or environmental reasons, let's test these presumptions.

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

Experts say it may not be possible to eliminate chronic wasting disease in deer and elk in Canada.

The fatal infectious disease is so well established in Saskatchewan and Alberta that the federal government and some provinces are rethinking how to deal with what is commonly known as CWD.

In 2005, Ottawa announced a national strategy to control chronic wasting disease in the hope of finding ways to eradicate it. Now the emphasis is shifting to preventing CWD from spreading, especially in the wild.

"We have to realize that we may not be able to eradicate this disease currently from Canada, given that we don't have any effective tools, so we may be looking at switching from eradication to control," said Penny Greenwood, national manager of domestic disease control for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The agency says it is working with the provinces and the game-ranching industry to come up with a better plan, perhaps by next spring.

"We feel that the current program that we have had in place for chronic wasting disease ... is not effective in achieving its goals," Greenwood said.

CWD is caused by abnormal proteins called prions and is similar to mad cow disease. There is no vaccine against it. Symptoms can take months or years to develop. They include weight loss, tremors, lack of co-ordination, paralysis and, ultimately, death.

Think you do just fine on five or six hours of shut-eye? Chances are, you are among the many millions who unwittingly shortchange themselves on sleep.

Research shows that most people require seven or eight hours of sleep to function optimally. Failing to get enough sleep night after night can compromise your health and may even shorten your life. From infancy to old age, the effects of inadequate sleep can profoundly affect memory, learning, creativity, productivity and emotional stability, as well as your physical health.

According to sleep specialists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, among others, a number of bodily systems are negatively affected by inadequate sleep: the heart, lungs and kidneys; appetite, metabolism and weight control; immune function and disease resistance; sensitivity to pain; reaction time; mood; and brain function.

Poor sleep is also a risk factor for depression and substance abuse, especially among people with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Anne Germain, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. People with PTSD tend to relive their trauma when they try to sleep, which keeps their brains in a heightened state of alertness.

A scathing new report on Celestial Seasonings teas and parent company Hain Celestial, shows 91% of the samples of Celestial Seasonings teas tested contained pesticides in levels that exceed U.S Federal limits.

High pesticides in 91% of samples

10 out of 11 varieties of Celestial Seasonings teas, one of the largest specialty tea manufacturers in North America, were found to contain excess pesticides in Antioxidant Max Blood Orange and Sleepytime Kids Goodnight Grape among other varieties.

From great beginnings...

Started in 1969, Celestial Seasonings was "founded on the belief that all-natural herbal teas could help people live healthier lives."

However, the tests conducted by EuroFins, an independent analytic testing company, determined that many varieties of Celestial Seasonings teas contained potentially dangerous levels of multiple pesticides.

The tests were part of a larger report by investment company Glaucus Research, which is highly critical of Celestial Seasonings parent company Hain Celestial. Read the full Glaucus report here. (Copies of the pesticide test results begin on page 29).

In my clinical work involving clients who typically present with chronic somatic problems, it is truly a joy when markers emerge that reflect, "the means by which" their healing experiences occurred.

Since beginning to write this series of articles on "Freeing the Heart," more and more of my clients are regaining their quality of life more quickly.

Additionally, for those clients who have progressions of degenerating physiological function, their bodies are expressing their symptoms in more classic medical ways allowing for clearer and more appropriate diagnosis and treatment. And, for those whose bodies have held sub-clinical infections, many for multiple decades, they are responding so fast that I am in true amazement.

My latest premise about human aging is that the vagus nerves, for many possible reasons, cedes the functioning of the digestive system to the enteric nervous system which is probably overseen by the celiac plexus. The ceding of this responsibility is proposed to be the result of the need for the organism as a whole to concentrate its efforts toward running of the heart/lung complex and its contributions to our ability to speak.

The progression of cardiovascular disease is an exceedingly subtle one until, it isn't. Let's be clear, our bodies are not that different from how we organize our lives. We prioritize and distribute our energies as the obvious needs present themselves, disregarding what we can and delegating to others what we must.

Consider this analogy: Life gets hectic in the family, more money is needed to make ends meet and one or both parents take on a second job to financially keep up with the expanding needs, wants and desires of their children. As a result, one or more of the children is assigned the cooking responsibilities or even does the shopping, planning, clean-up and taking out the trash to accommodate this loss of parental skill and supervision. Most everything gets done but without the finesse, organization or thoroughness of an adult. It's a crude analogy but, in the ballpark for our purposes.

So it is when our autonomic nervous system is evolutionarily focused on the higher priority of getting the next breath and pumping freshly oxygenated blood, digestion becomes a secondary priority. Thus, without the brain's monitoring the Gastrointestinal tract, digestion, assimilation of nutrients and waste removal all happens, but with less coordination and efficiency.