Bone marrow cells that produce brain-derived eurotrophic factor (BDNF), known to affect regulation of food intake, travel to part of the hypothalamus in the brain where they "fine-tune" appetite, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, in a report that appears online in the journal Nature Communications.

"We knew that blood cells produced BDNF," said Dr. Lawrence Chan, professor of molecular and cellular biology and professor and chief of the division of diabetes, endocrinology & metabolism in the department of medicine and director of the federally funded Diabetes Research Center, all at BCM. The factor is produced in the brain and in nerve cells as well. "We didn't know why it was produced in blood cells."

Dr. Hiroshi Urabe and Dr. Hideto Kojima, current and former postdoctoral fellows in Chan's laboratory respectively, looked for BDNF in the brains of mice who had not been fed for about 24 hours. The bone marrow-derived cells had been marked with a fluorescent protein that showed up on microscopy. To their surprise, they found cells producing BDNF in a part of the brain's hypothalamus called the paraventricular nucleus.

"We knew that in embryonic development, some blood cells do go to the brain and become microglial cells," said Chan. (Microglial cells form part of the supporting structure of the central nervous system. They are characterized by a nucleus from which "branches" expand in all directions.) "This is the first time we have shown that this happens in adulthood. Blood cells can go to one part of the brain and become physically changed to become microglial-like cells."

One week of bad sleep can "switch off" hundreds of genes and raise the risk of a host of illnesses including obesity and heart disease, scientists claim.

Getting fewer than six hours' sleep per night deactivates genes which play a key role in the body's constant process of self-repair and replenishment, according to a new study.

Our bodies depend on genes to produce a constant supply of proteins which are used to replace or repair damaged tissue, but after a week of sleep deprivation some of these stopped working.

The findings suggest that chronic lack of sleep could prevent the body from fully replenishing itself and raise the risk of a host of diseases, researchers said.

Scientists from Surrey University divided 26 volunteers into two groups, one of which slept for less than six hours per night for an entire week, and one which slept for ten hours per night.

At the end of the week each group was kept awake for 40 hours and donated blood samples, which were studied to examine the effects of their sleep regimes.

The U.S. health care system is a giant money making scam that is designed to drain as much money as possible out of all of us before we die. In the United States today, the health care industry is completely dominated by government bureaucrats, health insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations. The pharmaceutical corporations spend billions of dollars to convince all of us to become dependent on their legal drugs, the health insurance companies make billions of dollars by providing as little health care as possible, and they both spend millions of dollars to make sure that our politicians in Washington D.C. keep the gravy train rolling. Meanwhile, large numbers of doctors are going broke and patients are not getting the care that they need. At this point, our health care system is a complete and total disaster. Health care costs continue to go up rapidly, the level of care that we are receiving continues to go down, and every move that our politicians make just seems to make all of our health care problems even worse.

In America today, a single trip to the emergency room can easily cost you $100,000, and if you happen to get cancer you could end up with medical bills in excess of a million dollars. Even if you do have health insurance, there are usually limits on your coverage, and the truth is that just a single major illness is often enough to push most American families into bankruptcy. At the same time, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical corporations and health insurance company executives are absolutely swimming in huge mountains of cash. Unfortunately, this gigantic money making scam has become so large that it threatens to collapse both the U.S. health care system and the entire U.S. economy.

The following are 50 signs that the U.S. health care system is a massive money making scam that is about to collapse...

In the United States everything is polluted.

Democracy is polluted with special interests and corrupt politicians.

Accountability is polluted with executive branch exemptions from law and the Constitution and with special legal privileges for corporations, such as the Supreme Court given right to corporations to purchase American elections.

The Constitution is polluted with corrupt legal interpretations from the Bush and Obama regimes that have turned constitutional prohibitions into executive branch rights, transforming law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of government.

Waters are polluted with toxic waste spills, oil spills, chemical fertilizer run-off with resulting red tides and dead zones, acid discharges from mining with resulting destructive algae such as prymnesium parvum, from toxic chemicals used in fracking and with methane that fracking releases into wells and aquifers, resulting in warnings to homeowners near to fracking operations to open their windows when showering.

© Arab Fancy

The FDA has taken a freely-available herbal product, sap of the dragon's blood tree, defined it as the drug Fulyzac, & handed it to Big Pharma. Nature's gift is being polluted. What you get after Big Pharma and & the FDA get their hands on it has lost much of its value and often been rendered into a poison, the very nature of a drug.

An extract from a South American tree known as dragon's blood is now classed as a drug and the FDA has handed sole rights to a single pharmaceutical corporation. The drug, which is made by Salix Pharmaceuticals, will be sold by Napo Pharmaceuticals of San Francisco under the brand name of Fulyzac. The generic term for it is crofelemer. It will be sold as a treatment for the diarrhea that's a common adverse effect of harsh HIV drugs.

The tree is botanically named Croton lechleri and called sangre de grado in Spanish and Portuguese, long known to have several health benefits, extract from the tree is commonly available in health food stores around the world. This, though, is likely to change in the face of the FDA's action. It signals their role in facilitating Big Pharma's takeover of the natural world's largesse. Piece by piece, anything that holds any health value is being declared a drug. Exclusive rights to that drug are then handed over to a private corporation.

Washington University engineering researchers have created a new type of air-cleaning technology that could better protect human lungs from allergens, airborne viruses and ultrafine particles in the air.

The device, known as the SXC ESP, was created by a team led by Pratim Biswas, PhD, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

A recent study of the device, published inApplied and Environmental Microbiology, found that it could help to prevent respiratory and viral infections and inhalation-induced allergic reactions more efficiently than existing filter-based systems.

Asthma, a chronic respiratory disease that can be triggered by inhaling allergens, pollen, pet dander and other particles, is one of the most costly health-care expenses in the United States at more than $50 billion.

"Because many people in developed countries spend the majority of time indoors, properly maintaining indoor air quality is an absolute necessity to protect public health," Biswas says.

Health officials and rescue mission leaders are trying to stop a unique type of tuberculosis that has infected 78 people and killed 11.

Public health officials have launched a new, coordinated attack to contain a persistent outbreak of tuberculosis on downtown Los Angeles' skid row, including a search for more than 4,500 people who may have been exposed to the disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched scientists to Los Angeles to help local health officials determine why the disease is spreading and how to stop it.

Officials say 11 have died since 2007. Sixty of the 78 cases were among homeless people who live on and around skid row.

Scientists have recently linked the outbreak to a tuberculosis strain that is unique to Los Angeles, with a few isolated cases outside the area.

"This is the largest outbreak in a decade," said Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "We are really putting all of our resources into this."

Ketogenic diets have been prescribed for seizures for a long time. The actual research diets used in the past were pretty dismal and seemed to involve drinking a lot of cream and eating a lot of mayonnaise. At Johns Hopkins, pediatric patients were admitted to the hospital for a 48 hour fast and then given eggnog (minus the rum and sugar, I'm guessing) until ketosis was achieved (usually took about 4 days). In addition, ketogenic diets were calorie restricted to just 75-90% of what would be considered a child's usual calorie intake, and often they were fluid-restricted too (1)! If we're talking soybean oil mayonnaise, you could see how someone could get into trouble with mineral deficiencies and liver problems pretty quickly

To understand "dismal," some of the latest research showed that a "modified Atkins protocol" was just as good as the classic ketogenic diet, and so much more liberating, as the patients were allowed up to 10 grams of carbohydrates daily, and they didn't begin with the fast, and they weren't calorie restricted (2)(3). While the classic ketogenic diet was 4:1:1 fat to carbs to protein. If you use MCT oil for 50% of your calories (have to add it in slowly though to prevent vomiting, diarrhea, and cramping!), you could increase the carbohydrates and proteins to a 1.2:1:1 fat:carb:protein and still get the same numbers of magical ketones circulating. And while "MCT oil" sounds nice and yummy when it is gorgeous coconut milk, this MCT Oil 100% Pure 32 fl.oz doesn't look quite as appetizing, especially when that is going the be half of what you eat for the foreseeable future (4). You can see why researchers consider ketogenic diets (especially the original versions) to be extremely difficult and unappetizing (they were), whereas seasoned low-carbers (who have a bit of a different idea what a ketogenic diet is) will find that attitude ridiculous, especially when you compare a ketogenic diet to the side effects of some anti-epileptic medications.

So it looks like modified Atkins (very very low carb, but not zero carb) and a preponderance of MCT is the same, ketone-wise, for the brain as the classic cream-heavy ketogenic diet. And what does it mean to have a ketogenic brain? Before, we talked about protons, but now I'm going to examine neurotransmitters and brain energy more closely. Specifically, glutamate and GABA (5).

If you recall, GABA is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian nervous system. Turns out, GABA is made from glutamate, which just happens to be the major excitatory neurotransmitter. You need them both, but we seem to get into trouble when have too much glutamate. Too much excitement in the brain means neurotoxicity, the extreme manifestation of which is seizures. But neurological diseases as varied as depression, bipolar disorder, migraines, ALS, and dementia have all been linked in some way to neurotoxicity.

The other day I received a message from a high school friend whom I remember to be brilliant, inspiring and creative. She was just a genius. Recently I learned that she also became a medical doctor and has worked in a public health care system treating elderly people ever since. She sent me a message over facebook frustrated because she found herself in the ridiculous situation of pointing out the obvious to Big Pharma reps and colleagues in a heated argument. Statin drugs - which are used to lower cholesterol - were killing old folks. The elderly are falling and getting some serious fractures at the very best and she was certain it was due to the statin drugs. Here is just SOME relevant information for what is worth, in addition to a 101 as to why cholesterol and its quality is so important for our health. May not doctor find him or herself in the situation of having to argue with a pharmaceutical rep or colleague about his or better judgement of eliminating statin drugs and/or advising high quality fat from animal products which saw us thrive for millennia.

The stuff of life

Cholesterol is the one unjustly vilified substance which our bodies can naturally make since it is absolutely essential to our functioning. Cholesterol is so crucial, the liver is careful to produce some 1000-1400 milligrams of it each day. We are told by the "Official Thought-Control Institutions" to eat up to 300 milligrams of cholesterol from our diets. But our liver production of cholesterol is controlled by feedback mechanisms depending on how much we eat. If we eat too much we produce less, leaving much needed liver energy for other important tasks such as detoxification from this most polluted modern world.

So when we eat more fat, our liver makes less, and vice-versa. But if we are hardly eating any cholesterol and we block its production with drugs, then we are literally screwed. That is the real meaning behind the most profitable drugs in the history of the world - statin medications to lower cholesterol blood.

Restricting or eliminating cholesterol overburdens the liver who now has to overproduce it through its enzyme - HMG-CoA reductase from carbohydrates in our diet to make up for the deficit. It is this enzyme the one that is blocked by statins drugs at the expense of depleting our bodies from the so much needed coenzyme CoQ10 - a key nutrient to our heart and overall health. Furthermore, producing cholesterol from carbs yields a bad quality cholesterol profile.

Colorado lawmakers Thursday rejected a proposal that would have required genetically engineered food to be labeled, amid fears that the mandate would burden farmers and raise food prices.

A Democratic House committee voted 7-2 against the bill after more than five hours of emotional testimony from mothers seeking labels and farmers saying the requirement would hurt them. The lawmakers ultimately sided with farm groups that said the change would need to be done on a federal level and not by an individual state.

"That's a price Washington should not ask one state's citizens to bear," concluded Rep. Kathleen Conti, R-Littleton.

More than 60 countries require genetically modified foods to be labeled, but the U.S. isn't one of them. Only Alaska has enacted legislation requiring the labeling of genetically engineered fish and shellfish products.

The federal government and dozens more states are considering similar label requirements amid complaints from consumers that genetically engineered foods may be unsafe.