Does high fructose corn syrup make some of us behave like drug-addicted rats?

New research by an expert on addiction has found the same pattern of behavior in rats on cocaine and rats self-dosing on high fructose corn syrup.

Dr. Francesco Leri, an associate professor of neuroscience and applied cognitive science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, presented these findings at the annual meeting last week of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience.

Leri has observed his "food addiction hypothesis" in two previously published studies, both using Oreo cookies, but this time he used actual high fructose corn syrup, selected "because of the controversy (over it) in the literature," he told me in an interview.

The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.

For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.

Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect - both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being "eclipsed" by drug companies.

"It's been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs," said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.

Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.

Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of "biological psychiatry," and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.

We like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won't need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a "superfood." A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Emerging research indicates that the Western diet could rightly be considered a 'Disease Vector' on par with influenza and other infectious diseases.

The CDC likes to track disease vectors like influenza and hepatitis, but the concept that immune status determines susceptibility, or the vital role that diet or environmental factors such as sunlight-mediated vitamin D levels play in whether you contract an illness or not, is mostly ignored by them.

It could be argued that the CDC would be far more effective in their mission of "Collaborating to create the expertise, information, and tools that people and communities need to protect their health" if they paid equal attention tracking dietary vectors of disease creation, such as per capita high-fructose corn syrup or happy meal consumption, or environmental chemical exposures, instead of myopically fixating on an outdated, though hugely profitable germ-centered model of disease causation.

Take the Western diet, for instance, which is increasingly the subject of preclinical and clinical investigation as a disease vector disturbingly effective at generating disease within the human body.

A study by John Guthman, PhD, director of counseling services at Hofstra University, uncovered more severe depression among college students. In 2009, 41% of students counseled at his college were diagnosed with moderate or severe depression, compared to 34% in 1997. Fewer were suicidal, however, perhaps due to improved services or perhaps because being surrounded by other depressed people makes you feel less alone.

Future shocked?

Dr Guthman opines that the reason more students have more severe depressive symptoms is that more of them are being diagnosed with depression before coming to college. Doesn't that just put off the real question: Why are more kids depressed?

Maybe it's future shock. In the early 1970s, in his book Future Shock, futurist Alvin Toffler predicted we would soon enter a state of change so rapid that we would flip out and all go crazy.

The accelerated rate of technological and social change will overwhelm people, leaving them disconnected and suffering from 'shattering stress and disorientation' - future shocked.

Smoking can help boost memory and concentration, say scientists. The discovery offers hope of a nicotine pill that mimics these effects to treat Alzheimer's disease.

Experts are developing drugs that copy the active ingredients in tobacco that stimulate the brain without causing heart disease, cancer, stroke or addiction.

The move follows the discovery that nicotine can boost the intelligence and recall ability of animals in laboratory experiments.

The researchers, who present their latest findings at a brain conference today, hope that the new drugs, which will be available in five years, could have fewer side effects than existing medicines for dementia.

But they stress the new treatment would not be a cure for Alzheimer's disease. At best it will only give patients a few extra months of independent life.

Tobacco has long been known to have a stimulating effect on the brain. Victorian doctors recommended smoking as a means of sharpening the wits and boosting concentration.

Along with unlabeled GMOs, we're ingesting toxic pesticides.

Genetically engineered (GE) crops are Hawaii's new plantation agriculture, and Hawaii is the world's leading producer of GE seed corn. According to a 2013 study commissioned by the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation, with funding from the biotech-supported Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, the Hawaii GE seed crop is not only the state's fastest-growing agricultural commodity, but the largest. Overall, GE agriculture is the largest contributor to increased pesticide use in the U.S.

The adoption of herbicide-resistant GE crop technology has been the primary contributor to a 527-million-pound increase in herbicide use from 1996 to 2011, according to USDA data analyzed by Charles Benbrook, research professor in the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University. In the last 20 years, the global agricultural input industry, which produces agrochemicals and GE seeds, has become one of the most consolidated and profitable in the world. Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont - the "Big 6" - now control a majority of the world market.

GE ag falls under the umbrella of industrial monoculture, which relies on heavy inputs of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides to produce one commodity crop. Since the days of sugar cane and pineapple, Hawaii has seen these monocrop practices exploit the land and the people on it.

Understanding GE ag can prove challenging because the science and the rules are always changing. The last few months have been especially abuzz with new development, from a Monsanto "Protection Act" in Congress to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in Monsanto's favor, to new pesticide research that has sparked debate about the safety of our food supply.

Let's Talk...

As Joan Rivers was wont to say.

But really, let's have a nice chat about the fact that our whole planet seems to have descended into lunacy!

The other day I noticed an interesting article the SOTT editors picked up:

Brain cells work differently than previously thought: Nicotine helps to spark creativity

which tells us:

Increasingly, studies are beginning to show that complex information processing, and perhaps consciousness itself, may result from coordinated activity among many parts of the brain connected by bundles of long axons. Cognitive problems may occur when these areas don't communicate properly with each other. [...]

Using nicotine, they stimulated the axon to determine how it would affect a signal the brain cell sent to the cortex. Without applying nicotine, about 35 percent of the messages sent by the brain cell reached the cortex. But when nicotine was applied to the axon, the success rate nearly doubled to about 70 percent.

It is no secret that the number of people with either gluten sensitivity or gluten intolerance, the latter of which is often diagnosed as Celiac disease, is on the rise all across the world. But what is commonly misunderstood about the difficulty or inability to digest wheat-containing foods is that "wheat gluten" literally represents a conglomerate of tens of thousands of potentially deadly proteins that are all capable of wreaking havoc on the body.

Sayer Ji, nutrition educator and Founder of GreenMedInfo.com, explains in a recent writeup how modern wheat is basically a byproduct of three different ancestral wheat varieties combined into one. The flour used in most processed foods and breads on the market today, in other words, comes from a hybridized form of wheat that seems to be responsible for causing an increasing number of people to experience serious health problems, including things like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), brain "fog," and hyperactivity disorders.

One of the hottest and most controversial issues in the world today is genetic engineering. With protests against Monsanto on May 25^th in over 400 cities, people have shown that this is a topic they truly care about. Largely, the stances are highly polarized with opponents saying it is all cancer causing, poisonous, and environmentally dangerous and supporters saying it is wonderful, improving yield and making everyone except "anti-science" opponents happy.

The problem with polarized positions is they almost always miss the reality of the issue and avoid talking about the general facts. Polarized texts instead skip directly to the evidence supporting their position. But, in real life, I think it is important to lay out exactly what we are talking about before we try to say if it is "good" or "bad."

The first question we have to address, before we talk about the potential and danger of genetic modification, is what exactly is genetic modification? If you want to avoid the science, you can just skip the next 3 paragraphs. Otherwise, I can advise continuing to read, using the sources I provide, or using a search engine.