The fork is your most powerful tool to change your health and the planet; food is the most powerful medicine to heal chronic illness.

The slow insidious displacement of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from MacDonald's. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved "food." More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.

Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in US pre-school aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don't watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network, than actually preparing their own meals. In his series Food Revolution, Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can't recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don't know how to cook.

Scientists have found a way to ease chronic ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, by stimulating a neck nerve and playing sounds to reboot the brain, according to research published Wednesday.

There is currently no cure for tinnitus, which can range from annoying to debilitating and affects as many as 23 million adults in the United States, including one in 10 seniors and 40 percent of military veterans.

For Gloria Chepko, 66, who has suffered from tinnitus since she was four years old, the sound she describes as "like crickets... but also bell-like," gets worse when she is tired.

"It's awful," she said. "Sometimes it is very loud, and it will get loud if I am under stress or if I have been going for a very long time and I am fatigued," she said.

"If my mind is tired and I sit down I will only hear this sound."

The Rosenhan experiment (also known as the the 'Thud' experiment, was a famous investigation into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It was published in the journal Science under the title "On being sane in insane places."

Rosenhan's study was conducted in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months.

Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors. In the first three hospitalizations, 35 of the total of 118 patients expressed a suspicion that the pseudopatients were sane, with some suggesting that the patients were researchers or journalists investigating the hospital.

All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.

The second part involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect fake patients that Rosenhan agreed to send. After a month, the staff identified large numbers of ordinary patients as impostors. Rosenhan then revealed that he had not sent any fake patients.

The following are both actual and paraphrased versions of questions I regularly get from readers:

If grains are so bad how can you explain the leanness and good health of Clarence Bass?

How is it that this guy can eat 30 bananas a day and not gain weight, or this guy can eat nothing but potatoes for 60 days and lose 20 pounds?

How do the Kitavans or Okinawans maintain good body composition despite a higher carb diet?

Mark, how were you able to maintain a low body fat percentage despite eating a half gallon of ice cream a day?

Why can my brother eat anything he wants and never gain a pound?

All of these examples seem contrary to what we say in the Primal Blueprint. How can they be explained? Are they anomalies? Tails of the bell curve? Is something else at work?

These questions all bring to mind one of the main principles underlying the Primal Blueprint, which is that ultimately there are no right or wrong answers in life, just choices we make based on what we think we know or what we believe to be in our best interest. I happen to think we here at Mark's Daily Apple have hit upon a range of choices within the Primal Blueprint - based on what we know about evolution and epigenetics - that can bring out the best in our health, fitness and energy. We seek to optimize our individual genetic potential using these principals and to literally influence gene signaling. Of course, there are other ways and other choices to get lean, some of which might even get you close to healthy if you do everything right. Me, I want the option that gets me the fittest and healthiest with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline and calorie-counting possible.

The truth is, if you never undertook to live a Primal lifestyle, the chances are still pretty good that you might enjoy a "relatively comfortable" existence for a substantial part of your life - until the wheels inevitably started to fall off. Millions of people around the world "get by" just fine in their obliviousness on the SAD (Standard American Diet), only 10 or 30 pounds overweight, a little arthritic, maybe some GERD for which they gladly take a pill. Some people even appear to thrive for a while on less-than-ideal diet and exercise programs. Even I did "adequately" on the Conventional Wisdom plan for a long time, and I'm pretty sure I'd still be doing reasonably well today had I not adopted this PB strategy myself. Of course, I'd be a little more decrepit and arthritic, less energetic, a little weaker and sick more often, and I'd probably still have IBS. And if I didn't know any better, I'd think all that was normal for a 57-year-old man, so I might even label myself "content."

Study finds that that night-time lighting reduces hormone associated with sleep and health.

People who spend their evenings in relatively bright light run the risk of stressing their bodies by ratcheting down the production of melatonin. Produced in the brain's pineal gland, this hormone plays a pivotal role in setting the body's biological clock - and, potentially, in limiting the development of certain cancers.

More than 100 young adults volunteered for a roughly 10-day research trial during which each took turns living in a light-controlled room at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. From midnight until 8 a.m. the room was totally dark. At other times, researchers from Harvard Medical School tinkered with the room's lighting.

On most evenings, the illumination averaged 200 lux (or roughly the brightness of a normal living room at night); on other evenings, it was no brighter than 3 lux (what might be expected from three candles burning at a distance of 1 meter.)

Doctors in the Czech Republic have resigned in large numbers as a protest against low salaries and poor working conditions.

The medicos handed in their resignations en masse after the Czech Doctors' Union launched the second phase of a "Thanks, We Are Leaving" campaign, aimed at pressuring the government to increase doctors wages.

The union had been trying to achieve pay levels of around one and a half times the wages already being earned at most health care facilities across the country.

The Czech Republic public health system had 20,000 doctors before the new year.

Having a larger waistline may shrink your brain.

Obesity is linked to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, which is known to be associated with cognitive impairment. So Antonio Convit at the New York University School of Medicine wanted to see what impact obesity had on the physical structure of the brain. He used magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of 44 obese individuals with those of 19 lean people of similar age and background.

He found that obese individuals had more water in the amygdala - a part of the brain involved in eating behaviour. He also saw smaller orbitofrontal cortices in obese individuals, important for impulse control and also involved in feeding behaviour (Brain Research, in press). "It could mean that there are less neurons, or that those neurons are shrunken," says Convit.

Cholesterol-lowering statins may do more harm than good in people who have suffered a stroke, researchers warned.

People who have suffered a certain kind of stroke may be more likely to have a recurrence if they are taking statins to lower their risk of heart disease, a study has found.

A team at Harvard Medical School in Boston, America, found that patients who had had a haemorrhagic stroke, or a bleeding on the brain stroke, as opposed to a clot or blocking stroke, may increase their chances of having another if they were on statins.

The findings are published in the journal Archives of Neurology.

Millions of people take statins every day to reduce the risk of heart disease and of having a heart attack.

Washington: In what could be a possible cause of schizophrenia, scientists claim to have found a link between the condition and trapped brain cells that are unable to reach the cortex, the brain's outer part.

A new study, led by University of New South Wales, has claimed that brain cells might become "stuck" in their journey during brain development to the outer "thinking" layer of the brain, which could be a cause of schizophrenia.

The scientists have found that in people with schizophrenia, brain cells destined for the cortex - the outer part of the brain associated with thinking and other cognitive abilities - could get trapped in the layer below.

Watching too much television or playing computer games damages your heart regardless of how much exercise you do, scientists have warned.

The risk of heart disease and premature death from any cause doubled for those spending more than fours hours a day glued to a screen, it was claimed.

Metabolic factors and inflammation may be partly to blame, the report said.

Research revealed those who devote more than four hours watching television, surfing the web, or playing computer games are more than twice as likely to have major cardiac problems.

Dr Emmanuel Stamatakis of University College London's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health said: "People who spend excessive amounts of time in front of a screen - primarily watching TV - are more likely to die of any cause and suffer heart-related problems.

"Our analysis suggests that two or more hours of screen time each day may place someone at greater risk for a cardiac event."