Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes and protracted winters, the traditional Inuit diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Most people subsisted on what they hunted and fished.

Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska describes her food culture:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish - salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.

These foods hardly make up the "balanced" diet most of us grew up with, and they look nothing like the mix of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy we're accustomed to seeing in conventional food pyramid diagrams. Yet how can people who gorge on fat and animal protein be healthier than we are?

Many experts are considering a redefinition of the personality disorder

Everyone knows a narcissist - either from life, politics, or fiction.

The friend who only thinks about herself. Political despots like Stalin or Mussolini. Fictional Mafia leaders Don Corleone and Tony Soprano, or characters like Gordon Gekko from the movie "Wall Street'' (representing a few real-world figures who work at that address).

Now, the group that defines mental illness in America is thinking about redefining narcissism.

Nothing's been decided yet, but there's a good chance that narcissistic personality disorder will cease to be a mental illness of its own and will instead be folded into other personality disorders, making it a trait of someone with a broader problem.

The labeling issue may seem arcane, but it matters to patients who want a name for their problem, to family members for whom a label can help them better understand their loved one, and to doctors who have to call it something in order to get reimbursed for treatment. It also matters to insurance companies, which generally require that a diagnosis fit a condition as officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

In a sense, narcissism has been done in by its own success.

Because so many narcissists are thriving - at the expense of the rest of us - it's hard to classify "narcissism'' as a disability. Growing up with a narcissistic parent or marrying one can be disabling, but, almost by definition, many narcissists go through life without realizing the harm they are doing to others.

A narcissist is someone who has an unrealistic sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy, and a "conviction of being different and special and entitled that is so profound that they feel it's only natural people will admire them and want to do whatever they want to do,'' said Dr. John M. Oldham, chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric research and treatment center in Houston. "Corporate America is filled with people with a lot of this kind of problem.''

Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute faculty member leads study resulting in new insight on rehabilitating brain function in addicts.

People with addictions to stimulants tend to choose instant gratification or a smaller but sooner reward over a future benefit, even if the future reward is greater. Reduced value of a future reward, called "delay discounting" by neuroscientists, is the major challenge for treatment of addiction. A new study in the February 2011 (Vol. 69, Issue 3) Biological Psychiatry appears to present a strategy for increasing the value of future rewards in the minds of addicts.

"The hope is for a new intervention to help addicts," said Warren K. Bickel, professor and director of the Center for Substance Abuse at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute effective Feb 1. 2011. Bickel will also be a professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech.

Bickel did the research when he was the Wilbur D. Mills Chair of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Prevention and director of the Center for Addiction Research and the Center for the Study of Tobacco Addiction at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

"It is a major coup for us to be able to attract Dr. Bickel to the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and Roanoke. He is a renowned research leader in understanding the strategies used by the human brain during addiction and his latest work is providing valuable new insights into potential therapeutic strategies for rehabilitating the addicted human brain," said Michael Friedlander, executive director of the research institute.

Vitamin D deficiency may affect human's lung structure and function, according to a new study conducted on mice by scientists from Australia.

Vitamin D has already been found associated with severity of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The Australian researchers compared two groups of two-week-old mice, one with vitamin D deficiency and the other without, for the lung volume and lung function.

The study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine showed the mice with Vitamin D deficiency had reduced the lung function and volume, compared with the control mice.

"The results of this study clearly demonstrate that vitamin D deficiency alters lung growth, resulting in lower lung volume and decrements in lung function," said Graeme Zosky, lead author of the study.

Imagine a world where:

• diabetes, heart diseases, autoimmunity and other modern diseases are rare or don't exist at all
• we are naturally lean and fit
• we are fertile throughout our childbearing years
• we sleep peacefully and deeply
• we age gracefully without degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and osteoporosis

While this might sound like pure fantasy today, anthropological evidence suggests that this is exactly how human beings lived for the vast majority of our evolutionary history.

Today, most people accept diseases like obesity, diabetes, infertility and Alzheimer's as "normal". But while these diseases may now be common, they're anything but normal. Humans evolved roughly 2.5 million years ago, and for roughly 84,000 generations we were naturally free of the modern diseases which kill millions of people each year and make countless others miserable. In fact, the world I asked you to imagine above - which may seem preposterous and unattainable today - was the natural human state for our entire history on this planet up until a couple hundred years ago.

What was responsible for the change? What transformed us from naturally healthy and vital people free of degenerative disease into a world of sick, fat, infertile and unhappy people?

In a word? The modern lifestyle. And though there are several aspects of our current lifestyle that contribute to disease, the widespread consumption of food toxins is by far the greatest offender. Specifically, the following four dietary toxins are to blame:

• Cereal grains (especially refined flour)
• Omega-6 industrial seed oils (corn, cottonseed, safflower, soybean, etc.)
• Sugar (especially high-fructose corn syrup)
• Processed soy (soy milk, soy protein, soy flour, etc.)

Say you happen to eat some chicken fingers contaminated with bacteria because the 19-year old kid behind the counter failed to wash his hands after using the toilet, or because the kitchen is poorly managed with unwashed counters and cutting boards, or because the food is undercooked. You get a bout of diarrhea and cramps, along with a desire to banish chicken from your life.

Here's yet another odd wheat phenomenon: About 30% of people who eliminate wheat from their lives experience an acute food poisoning-like effect on re-exposure. You've been wheat-free for, say, 6 months. You've lost 25 lbs from your wheat belly, you've regained energy, joints feel better. You go to an office party where they're serving some really yummy looking bruschetta. Surely a couple won't hurt! Within a hour, you're getting that awful rumbling and unease that precede the explosion.

The majority of people who experience a wheat re-exposure syndrome will have diarrhea and cramps that can last from hours to days, similar to food poisoning. (Why? Why would a common food trigger a food poisoning-like effect? It happens too fast to attribute to inflammation.) Others experience asthma attacks, joint pains that last 48 hours to a week, mental fogginess, emotional distress, even rage (in males).

Wheat re-exposure in the susceptible provides a tidy demonstration of the effects of this peculiar product of genetic research. So if you are wheat-free but entertain an occasional indulgence, don't be surprised if you have to make a beeline to the toilet.

You've heard of "beer bellies," the protuberant, sagging abdomen of someone who drinks excessive quantities of beer.

How about "wheat belly"?

That's the same protuberant, sagging abdomen that develops when you overindulge in processed wheat products like pretzels, crackers, breads, waffles, pancakes, breakfast cereals and pasta.

(By the way, this image, borrowed from the wonderful people at Wikipedia, is that of a teenager, who supplied a photo of himself.)

It represents the excessive visceral fat that laces the intestines and triggers a drop in HDL, rise in triglycerides, inflames small LDL particles, C-reactive protein, raises blood sugar, raises blood pressure, creates poor insulin responsiveness, etc.

How common is it? Just look around you and you'll quickly recognize it in dozens or hundreds of people in the next few minutes. It's everywhere.

Wheat bellies are created and propagated by the sea of mis-information that is delivered to your door every day by food manufacturers. It's the same campaign of mis-information that caused the wife of a patient of mine who was in the hospital (one of my rare hospitalizations) to balk in disbelief when I told her that her husband's 18 lb weight gain over the past 6 months was due to the Shredded Wheat Cereal for breakfast, turkey sandwiches for lunch, and whole wheat pasta for dinner.

"But that's what they told us to eat after Dan left the hospital after his last stent!"

A recent headline blares that fully one third of people in the U.S. have "prediabetes." This sounds dire, because the implication is that it is only a matter of time until one third of the population has full-fledged diabetes.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that will ever happen. The incidence of full-fledged diabetes has remained around 9% in the entire population for decades and most of the small recent rise in diagnoses is attributable to the lowering of the blood sugar level at which diabetes is supposed diagnosed that happened in 1998.

Though the name makes it sound like prediabetes and diabetes are two stages of one condition, research that has studied the patterns in which the disease develops--makes it clear that they are not. (Details here.)

A diagnosis of prediabetes means only that a person's blood sugar has been tested and found to lie in a specific range, one that stretches from the top of normal to the lower bound of the range defined as diabetic. But there are two major--completely unrelated--reasons why people's blood sugar might rise into that prediabetic range. The first, and most common reason, is that they have developed insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance describes people who need to use more than normal amounts of insulin to counteract the blood-sugar-raising effects of the carbohydrates they eat. Where a normal person might be able to keep their blood sugars rising after eating 40 grams of sugar and starch by secreting two units of insulin, an insulin resistant person might need to secrete 20 units to keep blood sugars from rising after eating the same amount of food.

A surge in insulin resistance in the general population appears to be what is driving the increase in diagnoses of prediabetes.

The other, and much more serious, reason people's blood sugar rises into the prediabetic range is that their beta cells don't work properly, and are having trouble secreting insulin. In that case, a person who needs to secrete two units to keep their blood sugar normal after eating can only make one unit, when they need two. Or if they are also insulin resistant, they may be making only ten when they need that twenty.

You don't have to eat cattle who have worn trenbolone ear implants to end up with the growth stimulating androgenic hormone in your body reported the Associated Press in 2008.

Water taken near a Nebraska feedlot had four times the trenbolone levels as other water samples and male fathead minnows nearby had low testosterone levels and small heads.

Nor do you have to see a doctor to imbibe a witch's brew of prescriptions like pain pills, antibiotics and psychiatric, cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy and heart meds in your drinking water, says the AP. Free of charge.

Other "biosolids" found in drinking water include anti-fungal drugs and the toxic plastic, Bisphenol A, from some bottled waters which people ironically drink to avoid tap water.

At the end of the two-day hearing to evaluate the safety of amalgam, the FDA's own scientific panel - including neurologists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, and environmental health specialists - told the agency to stop amalgam use in children, pregnant women, and hypersensitive populations.

After reviewing the available scientific studies and the presentations of researchers, experts, dentists, and injured consumers, the scientists concluded that - contrary to the claims of the FDA's in-house dentist Susan Runner - amalgam is not safe for everybody.

According to the panel, the FDA's amalgam risk assessments were not adequate to protect hypersensitive adults, children, and unborn babies. Repeatedly, panel members expressed their concern about amalgam use in children. Pediatric neurologist Dr. Suresh Kotagal of the Mayo Clinic summed it up for the entire panel:

"There is really no place for mercury in children."

Other panelists went on to explain that dental mercury is like lead. The panel urged the FDA to quickly contraindicate amalgam for these vulnerable populations and insisted that the FDA provide consumers with labeling containing clear warnings.

Source

Reuters.com December 15, 2010