Former commercial bait fisherman Joey Yerkes discusses his experience working on BP's oil disaster clean up and the serious health impacts he has encountered. Additional discussions with Kindra Arnesen, Donny Mastler, and John Gooding.

Food allergy in children is more common than previously thought, and often is associated with severe symptoms and multiple foods, a new survey found.

The prevalence of food allergy in children and adolescents younger than 18 was 8% (95% CI 7.6 to 8.3), according to Ruchi S. Gupta, MD, of Northwestern University in Chicago, and colleagues.

That percentage translates into almost six million children in the U.S., the researchers noted.

And among these allergic children, 38.7% had a history of severe reactions and 30.4% were allergic to more than one type of food, they reported online in Pediatrics.

Countries define food as "any item that is to be processed, partially processed, or unprocessed for consumption."

While the The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) recognition of the human right to food remains in place, the definition of food itself has been hollowed out. Some countries have created a new legal definition of food. It does not include any reference to the core aspects of food - sustaining life.

Food is defined as "any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells in an effort to produce energy, maintain life, and/or stimulate growth."

In the legal definition, the essence food - what is in it, what it does - is not considered, only what is done to it or with it. These countries define food as "any item that is to be processed, partially processed, or unprocessed for consumption." Perhaps in recognition of the removal from food of what makes it food rather than any other material, the word "food stuffs" is used, which include any substance to be ingested by humans. This could be "stuff" insufficient to sustain life or even antithetical to it.

Celebrities are famous for their on-screen work and also attract a fair bit of flack for their bizarre weight loss diets. Their dietary antics however cause us a lot of amusement and keep the tabloids buzzing.

Some diets, however, have caught the fancy of the average dieter and fitness buff alike and have been implemented easily across the board. Here are 5 such diets which celebrities have endorsed and popularized and are more than unsustainable fads. You never know, one of them could catch your fancy and work for you!

Seven persons, including four women, died of a mysterious illness in Garhmukteshwar tehsil area here in the last 24 hours, officials said today. In Garhmukteshwar town, Kallam Khan, 55, and Poonam, 35, succumbed to a mysterious illness, characterised by high fever, yesterday, they said. In Badarkha and Rajheti villages, two persons, Mansuran and Rea Liyaqt, fell victim to the illness that is yet to be identified. In similar cases, two women, Ishwari Devi and Raghubiri, and a man, Satyabir, died after suffering from high fever in Datiyana village here today, said officials. Chief district medical officer Sharad Tyagi said that none of the seven persons who died had sought medical attention.

"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster."


[Rober Sapolsky:] In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have - in terms of free will, determinism - my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there, and if there is, it's in the least interesting places and getting more sparse all the time. But there's a whole new realm of neuroscience which I've been thinking about, which I'm starting to do research on, that throws in another element of things going on below the surface affecting our behavior. And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host.

Some of these are pretty astounding. There's this barnacle that rides on the back of some crab and is able to inject estrogenic hormones into the crab if the crab is male, and at that point, the male's behavior becomes feminized. The male crab digs a hole in the sand for his eggs, except he has no eggs, but the barnacle sure does, and has just gotten this guy to build a nest for him. There are other ones where wasps parasitize caterpillars and get them to defend the wasp's nests for them. These are extraordinary examples.

The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster.

The normal life cycle for Toxo is one of these amazing bits of natural history. Toxo can only reproduce sexually in the gut of a cat. It comes out in the cat feces, feces get eaten by rodents. And Toxo's evolutionary challenge at that point is to figure out how to get rodents inside cats' stomachs. Now it could have done this in really unsubtle ways, such as cripple the rodent or some such thing. Toxo instead has developed this amazing capacity to alter innate behavior in rodents.

The obesity epidemic is not just an American health issue. New data from the World Health Organization show that more than 1 billion adults around the world are overweight, nearly a third of them obese. Their weight problems are adding to the global burden of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease and swelling the number of premature deaths worldwide. Obesity is causing significant declines in longevity around the world, in poor countries and rich ones, including the United States.


A baby born in America in 2009 could expect to live an average of 78 years, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

That's still true in many parts of the United States. But in some places, life expectancy has leveled off or even dropped slightly - a rarity in a developed country and, public health officials say, a cause for alarm. A study in the Journal of Health Metrics shows the United States now ranks behind 10 other developed countries when it comes to life expectancy, even though Americans spend more on health care than people in most other countries.

As the Mahatma Gandhi once said:

"First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win."

The paleo movement grew slowly for many years in the obscurity of Stage 1, and spent perhaps a year in Stage 2 being mocked as the "caveman diet". Now, after several years of exponential growth and a stubborn refusal to be co-opted, we have finally achieved Stage 3, "Then they fight you."

The latest example, of course, is the dismissive baloney pushed by the "experts" hired by US News and World Report, which ranks paleo dead last among 20 different diets - behind such food-free nutritional gimmicks as Slim-Fast and the Volumetrics Diet.

I have my differences with Loren Cordain, but his rebuttal is both comprehensive and devastating. Respect.

Also, the reader votes for "Did this diet work for you?" show that paleo is by far the most successful of the diets, with several thousand "Yes" votes and under 100 "No" votes. The only other diets to win more "Yes" than "No" votes were Weight Watchers and Atkins!

Previous to that, we've seen the repeated hatchet jobs on grass-fed beef by John Stossel (one in print and one on video), both of which use as their sole source non-peer-reviewed "research" from a scientist sponsored entirely by Elanco - a subsidiary of Eli Lilly that manufactures antibiotics and hormonal growth promoters for feedlot cattle, pigs, and chickens! President Obama's personal trainer, in a breathtakingly stupid article, has called paleo "the newest nutritional fad". (Solid rebuttal here.) And the avalanche of anti-paleo articles by "qualified experts" has just begun.

We might expect this sort of offensive from the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetic Association, because anyone eating any variation on the paleo diet is essentially telling them "All of you have been completely wrong for decades, and your bad advice is killing millions of people each year." And we might expect this sort of offensive from the PCRM, because they're just a front for vegans and animal rights activists.

Yes. According to EU Health Commissioner John Dalli, they are.

"We are revising our tobacco legislation to make sure that we expand their scope - not just to tobacco - because there are other products which are more harmful, and also on packaging, advertising and access to cigarettes in shops, which can all help people to give up," Dalli told EurActiv.

He explained: "Electronic cigarettes are an example. They are outside the scope of existing legislation, but if you go up on certain aeroplanes they are marketed all the time. This is the sort of expansion of legislation I am are (sic) talking about"

While we've always known that the anti-tobacco debate is rooted in fantasyland, it's only recently that those leading the campaign have begun to make patently absurd statements like this based on no evidence whatsoever.

To say e-cigs - which are proven to be 90% safer than cigarettes - are more harmful than smoking tobacco is not only astonishingly transparent bullshit, but also reckless in the extreme if it leads to a ban on the devices.

(and in case you think that is grotesque, try this)

The three-year anti-smoking campaign involves an interactive programme called iCoach, an application designed to encourage smokers to keep on trying to stop smoking. EU officers will be encouraged to lead by example and register with iCoach before it is let loose on the public. It has been published in all the European languages (you can see why the campaign is expected to cost 16 million euros).

As well as putting pressure on officers to sign up to this hideously expensive campaign in order to set an example to lesser mortals who don't work for it, EU Health Commissioner John Dalli also looks forward to extending legislation restricting the use of smokeless tobacco products. So not only will they resort to bullying EU employees, they will also seek to ban e-cigarettes and similar products and push for further restrictions on the marketing and selling of tobacco.