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As climate change and its impacts on our planet and society are still debated, a new report by the Climate Institute of Australia warns against the devastating effects of extreme weather events on communities' mental health.

Taking severe weather events in Australia as a point of focus for the study, the report also blames adverse weather on climate change and says:

"Unabated, a more hostile climate will spell a substantial rise in the incidence of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression - all at great personal suffering and, consequently, social and economic cost."

The document, published this week, also warns that up to 20% of affected communities will suffer extremes stress, emotional injury, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.

The study found that as severe weather events in Australia increase in number, "climate change will have many adverse impacts on Australians' health - physical risks, infectious diseases, heat-related ill effects, food safety and nutritional risks, mental health problems and premature deaths.

Asking three simple questions could help patients have more say and better understand their treatment options, according to University research.

Researchers from the University's School of Medicine's Department of Primary Care and Public Health have been working alongside doctors and nurses from Cardiff and the Vale University Health Board to develop tools to get the public more involved in deciding how they are treated.

By encouraging patients to ask three simple questions: What are my options? What are the possible benefits and risks of those options? How likely are the benefits and risks of each option to occur? the researchers hope to improve patient knowledge and encourage engagement with health staff to develop more tailored treatment.

The work is based on research that shows shared decision making can lead to better outcomes for patients. The Making Good Decisions in Collaboration (MAGIC) programme, funded by the Health Foundation, is a joint venture between Cardiff School of Medicine, Newcastle University, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board and Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

The 18-month programme, joint led by Professor Glyn Elwyn, School of Medicine, aims to explore how clinicians can engage patients in shared decision making and how it can be embedded into mainstream health services.

ABSTRACT: Modern diseases of civilization cause great distress and reduce happiness, healthy longevity and productivity. Our presentation focuses on the basis for applying an evolutionary medicine framework to the treatment and prevention of mental health issues, as well as using the framework in a corporate environment to promote employee well-being. We discuss rationale, evidence, barriers, and a future trajectory for evolutionary medicine.

As you all know, I have a number of vegetarians in my life, and there are many present and active in our MDA community. I empathize with the thinking that goes into their commitment, but I choose to eat meat and obviously encourage others to do the same for the sake of optimum health. I get a fair amount of emails from vegetarian readers who want to reintroduce meat into their diets. Although they see the health benefits of reclaiming omnivorism, they're hesitant about the transition itself. Have they been herbivores too long? Will they really be able to follow through? The Primal mind is willing, but the flesh remains unsure. I've found their concerns generally fall into four areas that I'll label taste, digestion, morality, and psychology. For all the vegetarians out there interested in rejoining the omnivorous side, let me take up your concerns and offer some Primal-minded suggestions.

Taste

Some vegetarians after many years are still nostalgic for certain meats (bacon seems to be the most common), while others have entirely lost any semblance of craving. Maybe they've managed to satisfy their taste for umami so well, they learned to live happily without any meat source. Alternatively, they may have vehemently talked themselves out of the taste long ago.

Faced with the interest in reclaiming meats' nutritional benefit, they wonder how to rebuild a positive relationship with their estranged fare. We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and we tend to lean toward the familiar. As hard as it may be for meat lovers to understand, giving up a food group for years (and in some cases decades) means wholly disengaging from it. One's associations with meat may become apathetic at best and full-on revulsion at worst. One reader worried because he'd come to hate the smell of grilled meat that wafted through his neighborhood from the corner restaurant. "If I can't even take the smell," he said, "I wonder how I'm ever going to stand the taste again."

Readers will undoubtedly have good advice on the subject, but let me offer a few suggestions to ease the taste transition. It goes without saying (except I'm saying it) to take it slowly. Use small bits of meat (shredded or ground) as filler in what are already favorite dishes. Add a bit of shredded lamb to a ratatouille. Include small bites of chicken or shrimp in a Greek salad. Throw a little ground beef in a veggie stew.

Conventional medical authorities say that consumption of saturated animal fats is bad for you and causes heart disease.

But a hundred years ago, fewer than than one in one hundred Americans were obese, and coronary heart disease was unknown. Then Procter and Gamble started marketing Crisco as a new kind of food -- the first commercially marketed trans fat. Crisco was originally used to make candles and soap, but with electrification causing a decline in candle sales, Procter and Gamble decided to promote the fat as a "healthier" all-vegetable-derived shortening

According to LewRockwell.com:

"Feeding high doses of fat and cholesterol to omnivores, like rats and dogs, does not produce atherosclerotic lesions in them ... In fact, it turns out that people who have highest percentage of saturated fat in their diets have the lowest risk of heart disease ... The last word on this subject should go to Julia Child ... Enjoy eating saturated fats, they're good for you!"

In the first article in this series, I showed that hypothyroidism is an autoimmune disease in 90% of cases. In this article we're going to discuss the connection between autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) and gluten intolerance.

Several studies show a strong link between AITD (both Hashimoto's and Graves') and gluten intolerance. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The link is so well-established that researchers suggest all people with AITD be screened for gluten intolerance, and vice versa.

What explains the connection? It's a case of mistaken identity. The molecular structure of gliadin, the protein portion of gluten, closely resembles that of the thyroid gland. When gliadin breaches the protective barrier of the gut, and enters the bloodstream, the immune system tags it for destruction. These antibodies to gliadin also cause the body to attack thyroid tissue. This means if you have AITD and you eat foods containing gluten, your immune system will attack your thyroid.

Even worse, the immune response to gluten can last up to 6 months each time you eat it. This explains why it is critical to eliminate gluten completely from your diet if you have AITD. There's no "80/20″ rule when it comes to gluten. Being "mostly" gluten-free isn't going to cut it. If you're gluten intolerant, you have to be 100% gluten-free to prevent immune destruction of your thyroid.

Eczema is the biggest skin disease facing Britain's children, experts say.

A survey of 123 dermatologists carried out by the British Skin Foundation found that 88 per cent believed childhood eczema had increased over the past three years to reach a "problematic scale".

It comes after an international study found that levels of the condition in Britain, which leaves young sufferers with dry and itchy rashes, are among the highest in the world and that being breastfed does not provide protection as previously thought.

An entire subculture is looking at the very, very distant past for a healthier approach to food.

The advent of agriculture marked the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic age, and shifted the advance of civilization into high gear. In relatively short order, humans enacted drastic lifestyle changes, but our genome didn't have time to adjust accordingly. "We have no evidence that the modal form of human bodies or brains has changed at all in the past 100,000 years," wrote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. The resulting disconnect between modern life and outdated bodies can cause problems, say members of the ancestral health movement, also known as "Paleos."

They include researchers, doctors, barefoot runners, and climbers of trees and corporate ladders, all searching for answers to life's bodily questions in an ancestral, evolutionary framework. The culinary aspect of this approach has gone mainstream in recent years, thanks largely to a slew of weight-loss books about the Paleo diet's proficiency at slimming people down, even while accommodating enough bacon-flavored ice cream to make Dr. Atkins drool in his grave.

"You are what you eat" is familiar enough, but how deep do the implications go? An interdisciplinary group of investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have found an association between long-term dietary patterns and the bacteria of the human gut. In a study of 98 healthy volunteers, the gut bacteria separated into two distinct groups, called enterotypes, that were associated with long-term consumption of either a typical Western diet rich in meat and fat versus a more agrarian diet rich in plant material. A subsequent controlled-feeding study of 10 subjects showed that gut microbiome composition changed detectably within 24 hours of initiating a high fat/low fiber or low fat/high fiber diet, but that the enterotype identity of the microbe group remained stable during the 10-day study, emphasizing the short-term stability of the enterotypes. The findings were published this week in Science Express, and may have implications for exploring the relationship between diet and therapies for gastriinstesinal dosirders.

"It's well known that diet strongly affects human health, but how diet influences health is not fully understood," says Frederic D. Bushman, PhD, professor of Microbiology , who led the study together with co-principle investigators James Lewis, MD, MSCE, professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and professor of Epidemiology, and Gary Wu, MD, professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology. "We found that diet is linked to the types of microbes in the gut, which provides a potential mechanism connecting diet with health."