Although controversial amongst advocates of mainstream medicine, herbs and spices can help keep us healthy, says Sophie Laggan

The common cold results in a stuffy nose, sore throat and husky voice along the lines of Barry White's. The symptoms aren't the least bit attractive and leave you feeling decidedly woeful. Although not directly caused by the drop in temperature, the increased use of public transport during the winter helps to spread the virus, which makes it pretty hard to avoid. So how can you boost your immune system and fend off colds this winter, without resorting to pharmaceuticals?

A new study published in the British Medical Journal confirms an earlier, highly controversial finding by the Cochrane Database Review (2009), which concluded that breast screenings are likely causing more harm than good.

Published last month (Dec. 2011) and entitled "Possible net harms of breast cancer screening: updated modelling of Forrest report," its authors concluded: "This analysis supports the claim that the introduction of breast cancer screening might have caused net harm for up to 10 years after the start of screening."

Keep in mind that the Cochrane Database Review is at the top of the "food chain" of truth, in the highly touted "evidence-based model" of conventional medicine.

Cochrane Database Reviews are produced by The Cochrane Collaboration, which is internationally recognized as the benchmark for high quality, evidence-based information concerning the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of common health care interventions. The organization, comprised of over 28,000 dedicated people from over 100 countries, prides itself on being an "independent" source of information, and historically has not been afraid to point out the corrupting influence of industry, which increasingly co-opts the biomedical research and publishing fields.

New study in Biological Psychiatry attempts to answer the question.

An important ongoing debate in the field of psychiatry is whether inflammation in the body is a consequence of or contributor to major depression. A new study in Biological Psychiatry has attempted to resolve the issue.

Inflammation in the body is common to many diseases, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and diabetes. Depression has also been linked to an inflammation marker in blood called C-reactive protein (CRP).

Dr. William Copeland at Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues tested the direction of association between depression and CRP in a large sample of adolescent and young adult volunteers. By following the children into young adulthood, they were able to assess the changes over time in both their CRP levels and any depressive symptoms or episodes.

They found that elevated levels of CRP did not predict later depression, but the number of cumulative depressive episodes was associated with increased levels of CRP.

The FDA is working to limit the amount of salt used and served by restaurants, but not only will that not help us, it might actually do harm.

The government and specifically the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been mulling over legislation that would regulate the amount of salt used and served by restaurants, following a recommendation by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2010. Now, being a physician and being against sodium reduction is like being a member of PETA and entering the Nathan's hot dog eating contest-and winning. It is generally frowned upon.

In addition to pursuing this regulatory intervention, the government, along with several medical professional societies, recently launched the Million Hearts initiative. This program, paid in part with tax dollars, aims to reduce heart attacks in the U.S. by one million. But the ends do not always justify the means, no matter how noble and good the intentions. A main goal of that program is to reduce sodium consumption by 20 percent.

This mandate might be debatable if the evidence between current amounts of sodium consumption and an increased risk of morbidity and mortality was incontrovertible. It is not. It remains at present inconclusive.

Hong Kong officials said Wednesday the discovery of a bacteria that cause Legionnaires' disease at the new government complex was "under control", while it was probing the source of the deadly bug.

In a major embarrassment to the city's government, ten water samples taken from various places at the harbourfront complex have been tested positive for Legionella, which causes Legionnaires' disease, a severe form of pneumonia.

The findings came after the city's education minister was hospitalised for nearly two weeks due to the potentially fatal disease. The bacteria found in a tap in his office washroom was about 14 times over the acceptable amount.

Food prices have gone up, and more people need help feeding their families

The fact that 46 million people - about a seventh of the U.S. population - now receive food stamps (i.e. help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)) should be enough to tell us that something is wrong with America's food system. But thanks to the way public food assistance is now set up, the problem is all but invisible to the rest of us.

Why are so many Americans using food stamps? Beyond our collective economic woes, a large part of the problem lies in the cost of food itself, which rose considerably in the last few years. Then there's the speculation market, which drives up the cost of commodity crops. Ethanol doesn't help, either.

• Prescriptions rise by more than a quarter in three years
• Depression costing economy nearly £11bn a year
• Financial uncertainty thought to be factor

The use of antidepressants has risen by more than a quarter in England in just three years, amid fears that more people are suffering from depression due to the economic crisis.

The number of prescriptions for antidepressants increased by 28% from 34m in 2007-08 to 43.4m in 2010-11, according to the NHS information centre.

Depression is also costing the economy nearly £11bn a year in lost earnings, NHS care and drug prescriptions.

Research by the House of Commons found the cost to the NHS of treating the illness is more than £520m a year.

Aubretia Edick has worked at a Walmart store in upstate New York for 11 years, but she won't buy fresh food there. Bagged salads, she claims, are often past their sell-by dates and, in the summer, fruit is sometimes kept on shelves until it rots. "They say, 'We'll take care of it,' but they don't. As a cashier, you hear a lot of people complain," she said.

Edick blames the problems on the store's chronic under-staffing and Walmart's lack of respect for the skilled labor needed to handle the nation's food supply. At her store, a former maintenance person was made produce manager. He's often diverted to other tasks. "If the toilets get backed up, they call him," she said.

Tracie McMillan, who did a stint working in the produce section of a Walmart store while researching her forthcoming book, The American Way of Eating, reports much the same. "They put a 20-year-old from electronics in charge of the produce department. He didn't know anything about food," she said. "We had a leak in the cooler that didn't get fixed for a month and all this moldy food was going out on the floor." Walmart doesn't accept the idea that "a supermarket takes any skill to run," she said. "They treated the produce like any other kind of merchandise."

Osteoporosis is not caused by a lack of limestone, oyster shell or bone meal. Heart attack, however, may be caused by supplementation with these exact same "elemental" forms of calcium, according to two meta-analyses published last year in the British Medical Journal.

Back in July of 2011, the British Medical Journal published the results of a high-powered meta-analysis which looked at whether or not calcium supplementation had any effect on cardiovascular disease risk. Indeed, this groundbreaking report, which was based on the results of five clinical trials conducted in the US, Britain and New Zealand, involving over 8,000 people, showed that taking elemental calcium supplements of 500 mg or more increased the relative risk of heart attack by 27%.

Though the study made international headlines at the time, critics soon took issue with the fact that it involved calcium supplementation without co-administered vitamin D. However, in April of that same year, another meta-analysis published in the same journal showed that even with co-administered D elemental calcium increased the risk of heart attack by 24%, and in addition, the composite of heart attack and stroke by 15% -- in essence, putting those doubts to rest.

The idea that calcium supplementation may be toxic to cardiovascular health is not new, as many in the field of nutrition have long warned against supplementation with elemental calcium; which is to say, calcium from limestone, oyster shell, egg shell and bone meal (hydroxylapatite). Despite the growing popularity of elemental calcium supplementation, largely reinforced by conventional health "experts" and organizations like the National Osteoporosis Foundation (whose corporate sponsors include calcium manufacturers like Oscal, and Citrical), the habit simply does not make sense. After all, have you ever experienced visceral disgust after accidentally consuming eggshell? If you have, you know your body is "hard-wired" to reject low-quality calcium sources (stones and bones as it were), in favor of getting calcium from food.

What follows is an innovative new paper that we feel deserves publication. We concede that this article is a stretch for OMNS in both size and content. However, the nonstandard but thought-provoking aspects of this work need to be presented and we choose to let our readers read or delete. - Andrew W. Saul, OMNS Editor.

As part of their recent OMNS critique of the practice of "evidence-based" medicine (EBM) (1), researchers Steve Hickey and Hilary Roberts argue that the legalistic requirements of EBM, such as its insistence on treatments that have met the "gold standard" of "well-designed, large-scale, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, clinical trials", actually prevent doctors from effectively diagnosing and treating their patients. In this article, I would like to elaborate on this part of their argument, which they warrant with a piece of cybernetic common-sense (2) known variously as the "Good-Regulator" theorem (GRT), or "Conant and Ashby" theorem, after the researchers who published its original proof. (3)

No need to worry about the technical jargon. If you can read these words then you have already understood something important about this result from the system sciences, even if you don't call it that. (4) Likewise, if you have ever used a street map to navigate a new city, a book index to browse the contents of a book, or perhaps an x-ray image or lab report to diagnose a patient's ailment, then you are already quite comfortable handling at least the gist of this conceptual power-tool, which can be paraphrased as follows: every good solution to a problem must be a representation of that problem. (5)