A spike in global food prices has pushed millions more into poverty since last summer, said World Bank president Robert Zoellick

The World Bank has given a stark warning of the impact of the rising cost of food, saying an estimated 44 million people had been pushed into poverty since last summer by soaring commodity prices.

Robert Zoellick, the Bank's president, said food prices had risen by almost 30% in the past year and were within striking distance of the record levels reached during 2008.

"Global food prices are rising to dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world," Zoellick said. "The price hike is already pushing millions of people into poverty, and putting stress on the most vulnerable, who spend more than half of their income on food."

Jiongchiri, South Korea-- More than 140 cases of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) have been confirmed nationwide in South Korea and millions of cows and pigs have been culled, but Lim Kang-soo never believed his cows could fall victim to this highly contagious animal disease.

Lim, a resident of Jeongchiri near Gongju in South Chungcheong Province, confidently invested his life savings into a small cow farm, believing in its notoriously strict vaccination policies -- until eight of his cattle tested positive for FMD last month.

"We sterilized ourselves head to toe whenever we stepped in and out of the shed," Lim said."Our village is tucked away deep in the hills, 60 kilometers away from the closest FMD case. How could this have happened?"

An independent investigation, commissioned by the Icheon municipality west of Seoul and released last week, gave weight to the argument that transmission by air and not direct contact might have been the primary force behind the rapid spread of the lethal airborne virus.

US researchers said Friday they have found that people who used two specific varieties of pesticide were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson's disease.

The pesticides, paraquat and rotenone, are not approved for house and garden use. Previous research on animals has linked paraquat to Parkinson's disease, so it is restricted to use by certified applicators.

Rotenone is approved only for use in killing invasive fish species.

"Rotenone directly inhibits the function of the mitochondria, the structure responsible for making energy in the cell," said study co-author Freya Kamel, a researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare. At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn't really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day. Doctors didn't routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn't pay much attention to it. In fact, at that time - as I recall, anyway - the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl. I was in medical school back then, and I don't really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids. I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It's hard to believe in today's world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public's awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat. Both - the article explained - were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it's amazing how it drips with misinformation. At the time, however, most people - physicians included - accepted it as gospel. Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

I could write a blog longer than the article (and it's a long article) describing and dissecting all the many errors, but I'm going to go over just one. And that one just briefly. But before I get to that, let me show you just a few of interesting small parts of the article beginning with the very first sentence:

An ingredient used in Coca-Cola and Pepsi is a cancer risk and should be banned, an influential lobby group has claimed.

The concerns relate to an artificial brown colouring agent that the researchers say could be causing thousands of cancers.

'The caramel colouring used in Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other foods is contaminated with two cancer-causing chemicals and should be banned,' said the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a health lobby group based in Washington, DC.

In a time when alternative medicine is fighting for all it is worth to be recognised as an effective form of medicine, it doesn't help when mainstream medicine continues to slate natural healthcare. I wish they'd at least do their homework before they launch their one-sided, misinformed attacks.

The truth is, if Big Pharma, the media and mainstream medicine had their way, we'd all be taking a daily statin with our breakfast... we all know where that would land us - riddled with side effects such as muscle weakness and liver damage.

Scientists identify a gene important for the daily rhythms of the sleep-wake cycle.

Northwestern University scientists have discovered a new mechanism in the core gears of the circadian clock. They found the loss of a certain gene, dubbed "twenty-four," messes up the rhythm of the common fruit fly's sleep-wake cycle, making it harder for the flies to awaken.

The circadian clock drives, among other things, when an organism wakes up and when it sleeps. While the Northwestern study was done using the fly Drosophila melanogaster, the findings have implications for humans.

The research will be published Feb. 17 in the journal Nature.

"The function of a clock is to tell your system to be prepared, that the sun is rising, and it's time to get up," said Ravi Allada, M.D., who led the research at Northwestern. "The flies without the twenty-four gene did not become much more active before dawn. The equivalent in humans would be someone who has trouble getting out of bed in the morning."

Allada is professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and associate director for the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology.

You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years, the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, including high cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Meanwhile during this same 60 years, the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed.

Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30-60 percent of their total caloric intake from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease? (1)

The fact is, all saturated fats are not created equal.

The operative word here is "created," because some saturated fats occur naturally, while other fats are artificially manipulated into a saturated state through the man-made process called hydrogenation.

When I wrote about diet soda and and its health effects last week, I didn't expect much of a reaction. I guess in the back of my mind, I was thinking, people still drink that stuff?

Well, they do - by the bucketful. Overall, U.S. soda consumption is declining slowly, but Americans still drink more soda than than anyone else on the planet, by a wide margin. According to one reckoning, the average American drinks 736 "eight-ounce servings" each year (though "eight-ounce serving" seems like a quaint notion in the age of the Big Gulp). I can't find good figures on how much of that gusher is diet soda, but apparently it's a lot. According to AdBrands.net, four of the top 10 leading U.S. soda brands are diet versions of big names like Coke and Pepsi.

The National Institutes of Health released research Friday that supported earlier research demonstrating a link between two pesticides and Parkinson's disease.

The study showed that people who used either rotenone or paraquat are about two-and-a-half times more likely to develop Parkinson's than people who never used either pesticide.

Pesticides were long suspected to be tied to Parkinson's, at least in part because of the high rate of the disease among farmworkers. Scientists have also been aware for many years that both paraquat and rotenone are neurotoxins that, when given to animals, reproduce features of Parkinson's in the brain.